NATIONAL SURVEYORS WEEK

National Surveyors Week is celebrated every year starting with the third Sunday in March. The goal of the week is to educate the public through classroom contact, media, and visible public service.

Surveying has been a part of the advancement of civilization since the beginning of recorded history. It’s necessary to plan and build most earth-bound projects. The first examples in the history of land surveying date back to the ancient Egyptians during the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza in 2700 BC. It is also used in transport, communications, mapping, and the definition of legal boundaries for land ownership. It is an important tool for research in many other scientific disciplines.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are 43,400 surveyors in the United States. Surveyors are skilled or familiar with several fields: geometry, trigonometry, regression analysis, physics, engineering, meteorology, programming languages, and the law. While the basics of surveying are the same, the tools of surveying today are much more technical than they once were. Drones and lasers have replaced much of the telescope-on-a-tripod work. Remote sensing and satellite imagery continue to improve and become cheaper, allowing more commonplace use. One prominent new technology includes three-dimensional (3D) scanning.

HOW TO OBSERVE

Invite an engineering firm to speak to your group or class. Host a brown-bag lunch and have a surveyor speak at the lunch.
Follow on Social Media with #NationalSurveyorsWeek.

HISTORY

National Surveyors Week was proclaimed nationally by Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the United States of America, on February 13, 1984.