Understanding arid‐region waterbird community dynamics during lake dry‐downs

These data were collected to explore changes in the bird community associated with Lake Ngami, Botswana, through successive drydown periods. Our analysis shows significant shifts, driven partially by changes in water level, in the species composition of the bird community over the period of study. The data set contains standardised half-hour point counts for the bird community of Lake Ngami, Botswana; and R code used for community-level analyses of the resulting time series. Counts were undertaken every 4 months from October 2007-July 2009.

We used the data to test three theoretical predictions: simplification of the bird community over time due to a reduction in habitat area and concurrent niche loss; large fluctuations in densities of mobile, opportunistic species; and high variance in predator and prey abundance. Despite temporal variance in species accumulation, we observed no obvious simplification of the bird community over time. There were distinct but consistent groupings of ...