Do you need to arrange for a land survey and are wondering what's involved? Arranging for a land survey is a vital part of property ownership. Whether you are buying the property, establishing the true boundaries of the land or checking the topography of the land before building, a land surveyor is best placed to gather the information you need. While land surveys have been used for many years, gathering the information for the survey hasn't always been easy.

How are land surveys performed?

Traditionally, a land surveyor would have to walk over all of the land they were surveying. Precise measurements would need to be taken at regular intervals, and all of the information gathered would then need to be entered onto the survey by hand. Producing surveys in this way is a slow process and can be incredibly labour-intensive, especially if the landscape is inhospitable. Recently, a faster, more accurate tool has become available to every land surveyor. An increasing number of land surveyors are now using drones to greatly cut down the labour involved in survey production. Where it might take a land surveyor days or even weeks to cross and measure a piece of land, a drone can gather all of the needed data in a single afternoon, making the data gathering more cost-effective as well as safer.

How does drone surveying work?

Instead of walking across the area that must be surveyed, a land surveyor can fly a drone over it instead. The drone will be equipped with a camera that can take multiple photographs of the area from a range of angles. These photographs are tagged with the relevant GPS coordinates so that the images can be combined to eventually produce highly detailed 2D and 3D maps of the area. The data that can be gathered from these maps is far in excess of anything that could be gathered by traditional techniques. The volume of data can be incredibly useful to clients since it allows them, for the first time, to gain valuable information such as volumetric measurements, which would not be cost-effectively available any other way.

If you want to know more about how your land surveyor could use drones to provide you with a faster more detailed survey, then talk to them today. The land surveyor will be able to explain the procedures used when surveying with drones and how this can translate into a high-quality survey for you.