The research, led by Santiago Zuluaga of the Spanish National Research Council together with F. Hernán Vargas of The Peregrine Fund and Juan M. Grande of Argentina’s Colaboratorio de Biodiversidad, Ecología y Conservación, tackles a long-standing blind spot in conservation science. Scientists have a well-developed framework for describing nature’s contributions to people, or NCP, the umbrella term covering everything from pollination and waste removal to spiritual inspiration. For large mammals such as wolves, bears, and ungulates, researchers have extensively mapped both the benefits these animals provide and the conflicts they generate. Raptors, by contrast, have been studied almost exclusively through an ecological lens, with far less attention paid to the social and cultural dimensions of how people live alongside them.

To close that gap, the team designed an online survey targeting raptor conservation professionals across the globe. The questionnaire was built around eleven categories of beneficial contributions and eight categories of detrimental contributions and conflicts, drawing on established frameworks from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and on earlier work with terrestrial carnivores. The survey was distributed in September 2019 through the World Working Group on Birds of Prey and Owls, the Raptor Research Foundation, The Peregrine Fund, regional raptor networks, and specialized social media groups, and remained open until January 2020, when the researchers closed it to avoid the uncontrollable influence of the emerging COVID-19 pandemic on responses.

Seventy-six experts from 31 countries ultimately participated, ranging from naturalists and ecologists to veterinarians and social scientists. Half held doctoral degrees, and the respondents’ ages spanned 23 to 77 years. The geographic spread leaned heavily toward Europe, North and Central America, and South America, with Africa, Asia, and Oceania underrepresented—a limitation the authors acknowledge. Participants answered separate questionnaires for four raptor groups: hawks and eagles, vultures, owls, and falcons. The researchers then analyzed how many of the assessed contribution items each expert recognized for each group, treating the data with a binomial mixed model that accounted for repeated responses from the same individuals.

The headline finding is that all four raptor groups were perceived to deliver substantially more benefits than harms. Owls emerged as the most beneficial group, with experts agreeing on 72 percent of their assessed beneficial contributions, followed by vultures at 54 percent, while falcons and the hawks-and-eagles group each reached 45 percent. On the detrimental side, hawks and eagles and falcons were the most implicated, each with expert agreement on a quarter of the assessed conflict items, compared with just one item in eight for vultures and owls. Hawks and eagles thus earned the label of the most controversial raptors: they were recognized as providing a high proportion of both benefits and conflicts, a duality that mirrors their real-world position as apex predators living alongside farmers and hunters.

Some individual contributions stood out with remarkable clarity. A striking 96 percent of experts identified disease-risk reduction as a benefit provided by vultures, reflecting the well-documented role of these obligate scavengers in removing carcasses that would otherwise harbor pathogens. Nearly as many, 92 percent, credited vultures with removing organic waste, an ecosystem service whose economic value has been estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars following catastrophic vulture declines in South Asia. Owls earned strong recognition for reducing species that cause human injury and death and for boosting agricultural output by preying on rodent pests. By contrast, some contributions flew under the radar: fewer than a fifth of experts recognized raptors as seed dispersers, and only about a third acknowledged their role in providing materials for crafts and traditional cultural practices.

The conflict patterns proved more group-specific than the benefits. Experts overwhelmingly associated hawks and eagles with predation on domestic livestock, at 63 percent agreement, and with competition with hunters for wild prey, at 53 percent. Falcons were similarly linked to livestock predation and to mistrust between decision-makers and local communities. Vultures were chiefly associated with misunderstanding among stakeholders over their management, while owls were most strongly tied to fear, with 63 percent of experts recognizing this detrimental contribution—a nod to deeply rooted beliefs in some societies that owls portend death and disaster, and to their persecution as vermin even where legal protection exists.

Beyond the bird-by-bird accounting, the study uncovered two factors that shape how experts themselves perceive raptors. First, experts who believed that an interdisciplinary approach—combining biological and social sciences—is more effective for raptor conservation recognized significantly higher proportions of both beneficial and detrimental contributions than those favoring a purely disciplinary, biology-only approach. This held true even though only 2 percent of respondents identified as social scientists, suggesting that the field’s practitioners increasingly appreciate that saving raptors requires understanding human behavior, livelihoods, and governance, not just ecology. Second, and perhaps more provocatively, women experts recognized significantly more of both the benefits and the conflicts than their male counterparts. Women made up fewer than a third of respondents, consistent with documented gender imbalances across conservation science, including the finding that women hold only about 29 percent of editorial board seats in biodiversity conservation journals.

The gender result carries practical weight. Prior research stretching back to the 1980s has shown that men and women wildlife professionals hold systematically different views on wildlife values and management, and that gender-diverse teams tend to produce more creative solutions and better decisions. The new findings extend that logic to raptor conservation: if women perceive a broader spectrum of raptor contributions and conflicts, then gender-balanced teams are more likely to capture the full picture needed for effective management. The authors argue that removing barriers to women’s participation in raptor conservation would be a win-win, improving both equity and the quality of conservation outcomes.

The study also sounds a cautionary note about what happens when conflicts are ignored. Poorly managed human–raptor conflicts can escalate into human–human conflicts over wildlife management, as documented in disputes over raptors and grouse moors in Scotland and in persecution of harpy eagles and Andean condors in the Neotropics. For vultures, the experts marginally disagreed on whether these scavengers prey on livestock, with 46 percent agreement—yet overlooking that local-scale predation, the authors contend, may inadvertently fuel the very stakeholder misunderstandings that make vulture conservation so contested. Conversely, some contributions are so culturally embedded that they cut both ways: vultures are poached for belief-based uses in West Africa and South America, while in Mumbai the same birds are actively valued for their role in Zoroastrian funerary practice. Because many such contributions and conflicts are deeply context-dependent, and because basic data are lacking for many of the world’s 561 raptor species, the authors argue that structured expert-knowledge assessments like this one will be indispensable for mapping raptor contributions at regional and national scales—and that the gender and disciplinary perspectives of the experts consulted should be deliberately considered when doing so.

Subject of Research: Expert assessment of raptors' beneficial and detrimental contributions to people and associated human–raptor conflicts worldwide

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

Article References: Zuluaga, S., Vargas, F. H., & Grande, J. M. (2026). Raptors’ contributions to people and human–raptor conflicts worldwide: an expert assessment. Frontiers in Bird Science, 5, Article 1819176. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbirs.2026.1819176

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fbirs.2026.1819176

Keywords: raptors, birds of prey, nature's contributions to people, human–wildlife conflict, vultures, owls, eagles, falcons, ecosystem services, conservation science, interdisciplinarity, gender bias