Surveying and Mapping for Water-Resource Planning

The need to recognize large natural areas such as watersheds or river basins as planning units and the comprehensive nature of watershed planning studies have important implications for the conduct of surveying and mapping operations, particularly in the large urban regions growing in the United States. Basic map requirements for areawide water resources planning in rapidly urbanizing areas include general purpose base maps, aerial photography, and precise base maps, all based on a system of survey control that assures full correlation of widespread topographic and cadastral operations. The state plane coordinate system, when correlated with the U. S. Public Land Survey System, provides an excellent basis for a practical and usable network of survey control that overcomes the inadequacies of plane surveying methods without sacrificing the simplicity of these methods and permits the preparation of general purpose and precise planning base maps meeting the requirements of comprehensive resource planning programs.