Surveying is the process of analyzing and recording the characteristics of a land area span to help design a plan or map for construction. In civil engineering, surveying is a critical part of every stage of a project’s development. The main purpose of surveying in civil engineering is to determine the three-dimensional relationships between different locations. Knowing information like the distances and angles between points and lines helps engineers determine how to draw up plans for public buildings, homes, roads, bridges, and a variety of other construction and infrastructure projects.

Surveying offers three main benefits:

• Assisting with land disputes: Surveying allows civil engineers to assess and record the boundaries of different properties to determine land ownership and settle legal disputes.
• Analyzing topography: Engineers can gather valuable information about terrain levels, elevation changes, existing structures, and more from the data surveying provides to improve project efficiency and safety.
• Collecting accurate data for proposals: Accurate surveys can help in completing engineering proposals.

Surveying is of vital importance in any engineering project. Some of the basic importance of surveying are:

• The first necessity in surveying is to prepare a plan and a section of an area to be covered by the project. From these prepared maps and sections, the best possible alignment, amount of earthwork, and other necessary details depending upon the nature of the project can be calculated.
• The planning and design of all Civil Engineering projects such as railways, highways, tunneling, irrigation, dams, reservoirs, waterworks, sewerage works, airfields, ports, massive buildings, and other structures require surveying.

During a survey, surveyors use various tools to do their job successfully and accurately, such as total stations, GPS receivers, prisms, 3D scanners, radio communicators, digital levels, dumpy level, and surveying software, among others. The most common survey in civil engineering is the topographic survey, which focuses on the qualities of the land itself.