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The Role of Land Surveyors in Construction
Construction Business Review | Saturday, March 14, 2020
Engineers and construction projects rely on land surveyors to determine the size and measurement of land.
FREMONT, CA: Land surveying is an essential service that measures and maps the surrounding environment to establish the boundary of a landowner's property. The surveyor's work can determine an angle, a distance, an elevation, a location, and an area. Aerial and terrestrial scanners, GPS, robotic total stations, and high-order GPS can map an area, calculate, and take photos. Surveyors draft plans and map onsite measurements using sophisticated software like AutoCAD. The work of a surveyor can range from subdividing land and exploring mining to tunneling and major construction.
Construction sites can use the right land surveyor to determine land size and measurement.
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Importance of land surveying: Laser scanning is increasingly becoming a part of other industries as it provides accurate, detailed data very quickly and requires fewer employees, resulting in lower costs for companies. Construction sites rely on surveys to better understand the site's characteristics efficiently before and while starting a project. Surveyors play an essential role in land development, including land subdivisions, roads, utilities, landscaping, and building roads. Architects and engineers utilize data from these measurements to understand the project, design and build buildings that work with the landscape, and manage safety considerations in construction projects.
Project managers must keep track of assets to ensure control and healthy growth. Standardization and calibration are important considerations in all industries while measuring, storing, and processing data onsite minimizes error sources. It is necessary to mark the boundaries on the ground so that observers standing on or near the property can see them. Facts and figures identify problem areas in time and help contractors take action accordingly. As well as surveying and land surveying the title insurer use surveying and land surveying to provide the evidence needed to remove certain standard exceptions to coverage and thus provide extended coverage against off-record title issues.
The bounding of many properties needs to be corrected. There was an error in past surveys, title errors, wrong easements, and illegal wildlife crossings. Many properties are divided for many years, so the risk of miscalculation increases with each new division. Abutting parcels cannot coincide with adjacent parcels, resulting in gaps and overlaps. Surveying challenges require research, interpretation, and established procedures to resolve discrepancies in almost every construction project. An effective surveyor conducts continuous error correction and updating, whereas official recordation documents replace the previously recorded and sometimes erroneous survey documents created by older monuments and survey methods.
GPS surveying: Survey grade GNSS are important in land surveyors for new township layouts, construction companies for survey control points, and to stake out roads. Drones require it for ground control points during surveys, and precision agriculture is increasingly using it. Studies show that some countries already have CORS systems to get accurate fixes from NTrip Rovers, which are connected to the CORS bases via the internet using cellphone networks. The companies that still need these systems plan to implement them within the next few years.
Land surveyors play a role in minimizing a project's environmental impact. When they take their land measurements, the survey team ensures that the land will not be adversely affected, the structure will be safe, and the project will be as efficient as possible. Accurate survey data is also beneficial to the planning phase of construction projects. Some of the ways surveyors can aid engineers in the earliest planning stages involve mitigating the risk of future regulatory enforcement actions, maximizing project startup through comprehensive planning, minimizing delays in project schedules, helping determine project scope and aiding in pre-construction planning, and establishing standards for later survey teams to follow.
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