Breeding biology of Neotropical Accipitriformes: state-of-the-art, research priorities, and conservation

Knowledge about breeding biology of Accipitriformes plays a key role in their management and conservation, also enabling greater efficiency of studies on their biology. In 1995, R. O. Bierregaard reviewed the literature on the biology of Central and South American diurnal raptors, to highlight information gaps. Similar works have been locally done in some South American countries recently, but there is still a lack of a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art of knowledge spanning the entire Neotropical region. We performed an analysis of the literature produced in the last 22 years, across the entire American continent, that reported breeding of 56 species of Neotropical Accipitriformes. By means of searches by keywords in Scholar Google, and in bibliographical sources, we found 441 references. Of 11 species for which the nest was undescribed in 1995, six remain in the same situation, and other two have only anecdotal data. Breeding behavior is still unknown for five species, and an additional five showed very little progress on this subject. The former “Leucopternis clade”, now known to be polyphyletic, remains the most problematic case of lack of knowledge. Nevertheless, circa 64% of the evaluated species had an improvement on the state of knowledge in at least one of these breeding traits. Research continues focusing disproportionately on a few regions and species, and there is still a great lack of data on South American populations, subspecies and/or species. By incorporating current conservation relevance, we have prepared a list of 24 priority species for studies.