I take a broad, systems approach to forest ecology. My research goal is to understand how forest ecosystems work in their entirety and how the ecological processes that underpin these ecosystems are altered by human actions. Historically, this has been an empirical enterprise and has centred on the Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems (SAFE) Project in Sabah, Malaysia, which I established in 2010. More recently, we have been moving towards process-based modelling of tropical forest ecosystems. An over-arching goal is to tie together these models to generate a Virtual Rainforest: a general ecosystem model replicating all of the key physical and biotic components of a rainforest.