From land cover analysis, cropland expansion was a major driving factor for land use land cover changes in Nigeria from 2000 to 2020. This further highlights the food production needs in the country. While this land use change indicates a significant alteration in land cover, it was exigent to assess land suitability using a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) combined with geospatial techniques to identify areas with agricultural suitability potential and to analyze cropland suitability. The results showed that the country had 8% of very high suitability, high suitability (25%), moderate suitability (29%), and marginal suitability (25%) croplands. However, low suitability accounts for 14% of the entire cropland. The spatial distribution of cropland suitability shows that most areas in the South East, South South, and South West, respectively, have the most suitable cropland as they meet the biophysical conditions for crop production, followed by the North Central regions, while most places in the North (North East and North West) have a higher share of moderate to low suitability. This study highlights the potential of the country to target localized self-sufficiency. Therefore, this study recommends using the cropland suitability map to launch food security programs across the six geopolitical zones to maximize their inherent environmental potentials to alleviate the country’s food production needs.

The establishment of protected areas is a cornerstone of conservation, but permanent protection could be inefficient or even impossible in some situations. We synthesized the literature on temporarily conserved areas (TCAs) across Canada, the United States, and Mexico. We used a comprehensive search string to retrieve peer‐reviewed articles published from 2000 to 2021 from the Web of Science. We identified 27 relevant peer‐reviewed articles that examined the potential benefits of TCAs in the study area, indicating TCA is a relatively understudied area of research in the peer‐reviewed literature. The TCA studies were highly clustered; 77% of studies focused on protecting a single life stage of migratory species and 61% of studies related to temporary conservation of breeding or staging habitats for migratory birds. Ninety‐three percent of studies focused on preventing human‐driven threats, mainly on public lands of coastal areas, the Great Plains, and the Mississippi Valley in the central United States. Short‐term and experimental studies were the dominant study types. TCAs have the potential to complement permanently protected areas and provide protection when permanent protection is difficult. Some included studies examined their conservation value, but the ecological, social, and economic outcomes of TCAs are unclear. More TCA research is needed to determine the role they could play in conservation worldwide. Embracing the concept of TCAs as conservation tool could lead to more comprehensive and consistent reporting of the outcomes of temporary area‐based conservation measures. However, a global review and analysis of effectiveness of TCAs will be required if they are to play a formal role in meeting international targets for biodiversity conservation.

In 2020, we developed a comprehensive methodology (henceforth, the methodology) to assess flood-related economic costs. The methodology covers direct damages, indirect effects, and losses and additional costs across 105 social, infrastructure, economic, and emergency response indicators. As a companion paper, this study presents findings from analysis of applying the methodology to investigate economic costs for major flood events between 2013 and 2017 and to assess gaps in the existing datasets across Canada, Mexico, and the United States. In addition, we conducted one case study from each country for an in-depth examination of the applicability of the methodology. Applying the methodology, Mexico showed the most complete flood indicator data availability and accessibility among the three countries. We found that most flood-related economic cost assessments evaluated only direct damages, and indirect effect data were rarely included in datasets in the three countries. Moreover, few of the records from Canada and the United States captured the losses and additional costs. Flood-related economic cost data at the municipal or county level were easily accessible in Mexico and the United States. Mexico’s National Center for Prevention of Disasters (Centro Nacional de Prevención de Desastres), unique among the three nations, provided access to centralized and comprehensive flood cost data. In the United States and Canada, data collection by multiple agencies that focus on different jurisdictions and scales of flood damage complicated comprehensive data collection and led to incomplete economic cost assessments. Our analysis strongly suggests that countries should aim to expand the set of data indicators available and become more granular across space and time while maintaining data quality. This study provides significant insights about approaches for collating spatial, temporal, and outcome-specific localized flood economic costs and the major data gaps across the three countries.

Permanent protected areas (PPAs) may be insufficient to protect migratory species, as they are fixed in space and unfeasible in many locations. Dynamic conservation strategies may be necessary to help conserve migratory species. We tested the cost‐effectiveness of temporarily conserved areas (TCAs), a dynamic conservation strategy, to provide temporary breeding habitat for Bobolink ( Dolichonyx oryzivorus ) and Eastern Meadowlark ( Sturnella magna ) across southern Ontario where substantial additions to the PPA network are difficult. We identified areas containing 30% of the species' abundance, representing 17% of the mapped area of suitable habitat. We then compared the cost‐effectiveness of PPAs via acquisition and TCAs via a payment program to offset financial losses due to delayed first hay harvest in temporarily‐protected fields under three social discount rate scenarios (−3%, 0%, and +3%). We found that the present value (lump‐sum equivalent) of a 10‐year term for TCAs is 14 times cheaper under the baseline 0% discount rate. The most cost‐effective areas to implement TCAs were in the most southern areas, where land is most expensive. Although TCAs cannot protect species that require permanent habitat protection, they are likely a cost‐effective supplementary approach to adaptively meeting habitat needs for migratory species in areas where new PPAs are impractical.