How does land surveying work?

 Understanding Land Surveying in Ontario: A Licensed Surveyor's Perspective

I can give a situation in Ontario, Canada since I have been a licensed Ontario Land Surveyor since 1987 and I had my practice in a small town. The general aim is usually to identify the boundaries of a piece of land and to relay the information to the client. This is somewhat oversimplified, but once you understand the location of the above boundaries, there are several products that one can come up with given a certain need of the client.

We can develop a special type of plan that indicates precisely the boundaries with bearings and distances and explain how they decided on the exact locations of the boundaries based on these surveys and deeds as compared to prior surveys. This type of plan is “deposited” in the provincial Land Titles system and becomes a public document accessible to other persons for a $5. 00 charge.

There is also a kind of plan we prepare for a person buying property which is alike but it also displays the buildings, fences, driveways, and easements and also depicts the title imperfections if any. These are not public documents. It goes only to the client and his solicitor. We also do a lot of sketches for what we call Planning Act applications such as land severances, rezoning, official plan amendments, and minor variance applications. boundaries, frontages, areas, and building setbacks are some of the information that a municipal planner requires to make decisions.

Another large part of the practice is construction layouts. We determine where a new house is going to be built on a building lot and mark the place for excavation. After the pit is made, we go back to install iron pins to construct the footing as shown below. It is common to find that new houses in developed communities are provided with even minimal space of 0. That would give me 02m to spare on the side yards. The builders require our layouts to gauge the placement of the house about the required property line setbacks.

Surveying requires a lot of research work from public Land Titles, our record files, and records of other surveyors and surveying companies. This is then succeeded by the fieldwork which requires searching for the evidence that may include survey bars and then successfully identifying this evidence by use of surveying instruments such as the total station equipped with a data collector. The field data is recorded in the office and data are plotted and then input into the coordinate geometry software to obtain the boundaries’ positions.

The processed data is then transferred to a CAD system to make necessary preparations for a plan. A monument is an iron bar put in the ground at the corners of the property. They inform individuals of the boundaries of the land that belong to them. They also make it easier when the next time we are surveying in that neighborhood. Shortcomings? To the best of my knowledge, I have not come across any. As stated earlier, every problem has a solution. It just needs some research to be done.