Greene County sits on karst. Roughly 2,500 sinkholes are mapped here. Questions? (417) 000-0000
Springfield Land Surveyor Greene County & the Ozarks

Topographic

Topographic surveys

A boundary survey answers where your lines are. A topographic survey answers what shape the ground is, which is what anybody has to know before designing something on it.

Two surveyors collecting topographic detail beside a rural highway, one working a GNSS rover and the other holding a levelling rod in a flooded roadside ditch
A topographic survey records the shape of the ground and everything sitting on it, at the density the designer asked for.

Who orders one

  • Civil engineers designing grading, drainage or stormwater
  • Architects siting a building on sloping ground
  • Developers assessing whether a site works before buying
  • Landscape architects and anyone planning earthwork
  • Owners with a drainage problem they want diagnosed rather than guessed at

What ends up on the drawing

  • Contour lines at a specified interval, commonly one or two feet
  • Spot elevations at critical points
  • Existing improvements, pavement, structures
  • Visible utilities and surface features such as manholes, inlets and meters
  • Trees, often above a specified caliper
  • Drainage features, ditches, culverts, ponds
  • The boundary, if a boundary survey is done alongside it

Scoping it properly

Most problems with topographic surveys are scoping problems, not fieldwork problems. Four things to settle before it is ordered.

Contour interval

One foot is standard for site design. Two foot is adequate for gently sloping ground and cheaper. On steep Ozarks terrain a coarser interval hides things that matter. Ask your engineer what they need rather than guessing.

Coverage limits

The most common expensive mistake. Survey stops at the property line, then the design needs to tie into the road, or match a neighbor's grade, or follow a drainage channel offsite. Going back for the extra strip costs another mobilization. Ask the engineer how far beyond the boundary they need.

Datum

Elevations have to reference something. Get it on a real vertical datum rather than an assumed local benchmark, particularly if flood work or utility tie-ins are involved.

Deliverable format

You want the CAD file with real coordinates, not just a PDF. A drawing floating at an arbitrary origin creates work for everyone downstream.

Karst makes drainage worth extra attention

On the Springfield Plateau, surface topography does not always predict where water actually goes. Karst terrain routes drainage underground through sinkholes, swallets and losing streams, which means a site can have a stormwater outlet that does not appear on any contour map.

Two practical implications. Closed depressions on a topo drawing are worth flagging rather than treating as ordinary low spots, because some of them are developing sinkholes. And a stormwater design that assumes surface flow off a site can be wrong in a way that only shows up after construction.

See sinkholes and your property for the regulatory side, including Greene County's 25 foot setback.

Need a topo for a design?

Send the address, the area you need covered, and your engineer's contour interval if you have it.

Request a quote

Springfield Land Surveyor is a referral service. We are not a surveying firm, we hold no Missouri land surveying license or corporate certificate of authority, and we do not perform survey work. We connect property owners with Missouri-licensed Professional Land Surveyors.
Call (417) 000-0000 Request a quote