Let X be an Archimedean vector lattice. We investigate subalgebras of \(\mathscr {L}(X)\) consisting of regular operators that contain all rank-one operators of the form \(a \otimes \varphi _b\) , where a and b are atoms of X and \(\varphi _b\) denotes the coordinate functional associated with b. Our main result shows that every positive automorphism of such a subalgebra contained in \(\mathscr {L}(c_{00}(\Lambda ))\) , is necessarily spatial, meaning that it is implemented by a transformation of the form \( T \mapsto P D\, T\, D^{-1} P^{-1}, \) where P is a permutation operator and D is a positive diagonal operator. We also use the Kakutani representation theorem to establish that every finite-dimensional vector subspace of X is order closed.