What is NSPS

NSPS is the voice of the professional surveying community in the United States and its territories.  Through its affiliation agreements with the respective state surveying societies, NSPS has a strong constituency base through which it communicates directly with lawmakers, agencies, and regulators at both the national and state levels.  NSPS monitors  and comments on legislation, regulation, and policies that have potential impact on the activities of its members and their clients, and collaborates with a multitude of other organizations within the geospatial community on issues of mutual interest.

Surveying Is 

According to the publication Definitions of Surveying and Related Terms, a definition of a survey is, “to inspect or investigate something in order to determine its state or condition” and surveying as, “the actual making of a survey and the recording and/or delineation of dimensions and details for subsequent use”. “Survey” is then further defined for 43 different types of uses.

So what does that tell us? Surveyors are not likely to run out of things to do!

Surveying has existed for thousands of years as a means to facilitate the location, construction, and cataloging of data about anything! From the time of the ancient Egyptians to modern day, Surveyors have been the first on the job, and the last to leave, to make sure that things are located, or constructed, where they are supposed to be.

At its core, surveying is a profession tied to the accurate location of property boundaries. This offers opportunities to research archives that are, in some cases, very old; go the project location and work outdoors searching for evidence, then processing that evidence to determine the correct location of land boundaries.

And that is only the beginning! Remember those 43 types of surveying?

As noted earlier, surveying is at the core of anything related to land use. Accordingly, Surveyors have the opportunity to utilize cutting edge technologies (GPS, Drones, Scanners……), typically before anyone else does. A poster developed by NASA about exploration of Mars, reads “Surveyors Wanted”. Talk about being first on the site!