Social demographics predict people’s perceptions of raptors

Background/Question/Methods

Biodiversity, the variety of lifeforms, is a vital component of Earth’s landscape and provides ecosystem services that humans are benefitted from (e.g. food supply, pollination, climate regulation, pest control, etc). Non-sustainable human actions are largely responsible for the losses in biodiversity the planet is currently experiencing. Human perceptions, the particular standpoints that a person takes towards an entity, influence human conduct towards nature and biodiversity conservation. Such a human dimension of biodiversity conservation emerges as the interaction between innate human attitudes as well as social and cultural learned processes. Human perceptions may range from being positive, to neutral, to negative, and vary across human individuals contingent on social, cultural, and demographic aspects. However, conservation science often neglects to factor such variability of human perceptions to biodiversity in the development of effective conservation strategies. Here, using extensive field surveys in Andean communities of Ecuador, we investigate the social perceptions towards raptors -birds of prey- and suggest specific actions to manage a more harmonic coexistence between humans and raptors along the Andes.

Results/Conclusions

People’s perceptions towards raptors in rural Andean communities were mostly neutral, however, negative or positive perceptions can be predicted based on the type of species and on demographic factors, specifically gender and educational level. Neutral perceptions can be explained by low levels of awareness of the raptors’ presence in the study area. Among all our socio-demographic predictors, combinations of gender and study level best predicted people’s perception of raptors. Our results suggest that males with technical education are generally much more likely to have a positive perception of raptors than women with only primary education levels, which are more likely to have either neutral or negative perceptions. Overall, genre had a stronger effect than education level to determine the type of people’s perceptions of raptors. Moreover, positive and negative perceptions were found to differ among different raptor species. With our study, we demonstrate that ethnoscientific approaches can effectively guide conservation strategies. Mainly, effective raptor conservation efforts should be directed to women, especially seeking to identify women which are willing to pursue conservation actions that will not only benefit raptors but wildlife in general