American woodcock are monitored via the Singing-ground Survey, which was established in the late 1960s. Since then, survey routes have largely been static, and it is no longer clear whether these routes adequately monitor woodcock abundance across the larger landscape. To assess whether survey routes currently represent the landscape they were initially designed to represent, we assessed patterns in annual counts of woodcock along existing survey routes in Minnesota and Wisconsin, assessed changes in time in land cover types along these routes, related temporal changes in woodcock counts to changes in land cover composition, and compared current cover type composition along routes to current landscape cover type composition. We also compared past cover type composition along survey routes to landscape cover composition. Our results suggest that existing routes largely reflect the cover types of the broader landscape, and also results in counts that track changes in cover types along routes.
