Andrew Sugden

The botany student’s textbook leaf, in anatomical cross-section, is a sandwich with two thick fillings packaged between thin outer envelopes. The outer layers – upper and lower epidermis – are each usually a single layer of cells, coated with a waxy hydrophobic cuticle. The fillings – the mesophyll – have an upper rank of vertically-oriented palisade cells,...

A new wave of forest clearance is now spreading across eastern Amazonia, driven partly by the European preference for non-GM soya. Siberian forests, meanwhile, are being released from Russian state control into private ownership, raising the prospect of unregulated clear-felling for timber. Forests in the American west, Australia and Mediterranean Europe have burned extensively in summer...

The Prince of Wales would love The Forgiveness of Nature. The underlying vision is of England on a Saturday afternoon in late summer, the village green bathed in golden light, the groundsman leaning on his roller and puffing on his pipe, milkmaids and strapping young farmers snogging in the grass, Hereford cattle grazing calmly in nearby fields, confident that their softly marbled beef is...

In October 2000, the last wild Spix’s macaw, a solitary male, disappeared from its patch of forest in Brazil. The species is not, technically, extinct: a few dozen individual birds survive in zoos and in the aviaries of private collectors, but it is now in the realm of the undead, where it will remain until either the last individual dies or – less likely – the species is...

In 1984, a small patch, no more than a metre square, of the tropical alga Caulerpa taxifolia was discovered in the Mediterranean – where it had never been seen before – growing on the sea-bed immediately below the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, then under Jacques Cousteau’s directorship. Five years later, the area of the patch had extended to a hectare. In July 1990, another colony of the same alga appeared at Cap Martin in France, 5 kilometres to the east, and in September of the same year it was found near Toulon, 150 kilometres to the west. In 1992, patches were discovered in the Balearics. By the following year, Caulerpa had spread to Italy, as far as the whirlpool of Scylla and Charybdis, and in 1994 it turned up in the coastal waters of Croatia. By the end of 1996, the alga had invaded and occupied 70 sites on the northern Mediterranean coast, spreading over a total area of more than thirty square kilometres and to a depth of more than a hundred metres.