Bird communities show resilience to an extreme drought across a large savanna protected area

Extreme weather events, such as drought, are exacerbated by climate change. Drought impacts vegetation directly, but it also indirectly influences taxa, such as birds, that depend on plants. Although the diversity and abundance of birds and other taxa inform protected area (PA) biodiversity conservation mandates and monitoring programmes, in Africa, for example, there has historically been a general disregard for birdlife when PAs were gazetted. Thus, we aimed to understand how an extreme drought during 2015–2016 in the Kruger National Park, South Africa, impacted bird community composition, diversity and sensitivity to finer-scale pulse disturbances. We used bird species occurrence data and subsequent reporting rates (a proxy of abundance) from one of the world’s largest citizen science projects, the Southern African Bird Atlas Project (SABAP). We found that bird diversity significantly increased post-drought, but sensitivities were unaffected, suggesting a resilient bird community occupying this relatively large PA. Our findings show that one of Africa’s largest savanna PAs plays a seemingly important role in maintaining regional bird diversity in the face of extreme droughts. We urge PA management to monitor their bird communities and continue to support those who take the initiative to detect losses from severe, multi-season extreme weather events that are expected to become more frequent.