Raptors’ contributions to people and human–raptor conflicts worldwide: an expert assessment

Wildlife provides a wide range of nature’s contributions to people (NCP). At the same time, while they provide beneficial contributions, several detrimental contributions and/or human–wildlife conflicts (HWC) may also arise, particularly for wild predators and scavengers. Thus, interdisciplinary approaches that explicitly address both beneficial and detrimental contributions can make wildlife conservation efforts more effective. Despite this, historically, there has been an overall lack of interdisciplinary research on NCP/HWC provided by aerial predators and scavengers, such as raptors. Our study aimed to assess the viewpoints of experts on the NCP/HWC provided by raptors with the objective of understanding: i) the main NCP/HWC that experts recognize are provided by the different raptor groups and ii) how key factors such as the conservation approach and expert gender are related to experts’ viewpoints on these raptors’ NCP/HWC. Through an online survey, we received responses from experts on four raptor groups: hawks and eagles , vultures , owls , and falcons . Our results, based on experts’ viewpoints on raptors, revealed a consistent pattern that all raptor groups are perceived to provide more benefits than detriments to society. Vultures and owls were perceived as the most beneficial, whereas hawks and eagles were regarded as the most controversial raptor group. Experts considering an interdisciplinary approach as more effective for raptor conservation and women experts recognized a higher proportion of both beneficial NCP and detrimental NCP/HWC than experts considering a disciplinary approach and men experts . Similarly, recent literature reviews show that vultures, owls, and overall raptors provide more beneficial NCP than detrimental NCP/HWC. Due to the lack of data for many raptor species and some NCP/HWC being context-dependent, expert-based knowledge assessments will be indispensable to estimate detailed and comprehensible species contributions to people worldwide at finer regional scales and taxonomic levels. According to our results, experts’ conservation approach and gender should be considered in these future expert-based NCP mapping. Thus, it is hoped that this work can serve as a starting point for more comprehensive and detailed expert-based estimates of raptor contribution to people worldwide.