Increasing agricultural productivity while improving sustainability of agricultural landscapes are key challenges facing society. One strategy to help address these two needs is enhancing pest-regulating ecosystem services provided by organisms that reside in these landscapes. To do so, we must understand the foraging ecology of these organisms and corresponding links to ecosystem services provisioning. In some contexts, raptors provide substantial ecosystem services by reducing damage to crops through consumption and deterrence of pest species. In this review we identify measures of raptor foraging ecology that may act as ecosystem service proxies, examine predictors of these proxies (e.g., vegetation structure), and discuss how this information could be used to enhance pest regulation by raptors. Through a literature search, we identified raptors’ use of cultivated land cover (use), attack rate, and successful attack rate as ecosystem service proxies for which we could analyze the effects of various potential predictors. Our results showed that increased amount of cultivated land cover, shorter vegetation, and shorter distance to the nest or roost increase use by raptors. We also found that shorter/less dense vegetation increased attack rate, although we found no effect of any predictors on successful attack rate. We suggest that growers maintain shorter vegetation immediately adjacent to crops and natural cover within the greater landscape, such as forest. We recommend future research investigate 1) additional farm management characteristics that could influence use and attack rates, 2) the spatial scales at which land cover type influences raptor foraging ecology, and 3) additional measures of raptor foraging ecology and their impact on the strength of pest regulation services.
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