Geo Week Report: The Modernization of America's National Spatial Reference System
Foreword
The National Spatial Reference System (NSRS), the official national system for latitude, longitude, height, and gravity, is a key component of the national infrastructure that supports everything using geospatial information and data such as aviation, agriculture, floodplain mapping, construction, transportation, emergency response, and a lot more. Replacing the North American Datum of 1983 (NAD 83) and North American Vertical Datum of 1988 (NAVD 88) with the modernized NSRS is much needed to fix the misaligned and outdated systems, which is crucial for a lot of geospatial applications requiring precise positioning. The modernized NSRS will also be time-dependent coping with the deformation and tectonic activity.
The Geospatial Center for the Arctic and Pacific (GCAP) is supported by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Geodetic Survey (NGS) through a Geospatial Modeling Grant. GCAP is led by Oregon State University (OSU) with Dr. Chris Parrish serving as the Director, partnering with University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA), the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission (CRITFC), and the Yurok Tribe, to aid NGS in modernizing the NSRS. While the reality is that everyone will be impacted by the rollout of the new datums, GCAP is dedicated to helping the industry achieve a smoother transition to the modernized NSRS via the following project tasks:
1. Real-time PPP within NSRS
2. Hydrodynamic Modeling Columbia & Klamath
3. New Datums in Geospatial Applications
4. Development/Testing of OPUS Utilities
5. National RTN Alignment Service
6. Multi-GNSS
7. Education
8. Outreach
When GCAP was established in November 2023, I was tapped on multiple tasks including education and outreach. When thinking about how we can make a broader impact in the industry, Geo Week News immediately came to my mind. At the time, I happened to be working with Lora Burns from Geo Week on planning the presence of our Geomatics program at Oregon State University during Geo Week 2024. When I brought ideas about media coverage of GCAP, she was very supportive and connected me with the author, Matt Collins. After a rather brief conversation, Matt recognized the significance of modernization of the NSRS and the importance of GCAP. It takes no time for us to decide to shed some light on the effort at GCAP through Geo Week News. After some brainstorming and planning, we converged on putting together a series of articles throughout the year to keep the momentum given the various tasks that GCAP is tackling. Thanks to Matt’s hard work, we ended up completing 5 interviews with the GCAP members, and Matt did an incredible job in turning the hour-long in-depth conversations into 7 informative and impactful articles which were published on Geo Week News throughout 2024. To put a cherry on top, Matt also helped facilitate a webinar to further highlight the NGS and GCAP’s effort in the NSRS modernization.
I am deeply honored to introduce this report!
Dr. Ezra Che
Assistant Professor (Senior Research) of Geomatics
Oregon State University
Inside the Effort to Modernize the National Spatial Reference System
OAuthor MATT COLLINS
Contributing Editor
Geo Week News
ur understanding of the world around us is directly related to our technological capabilities. Most mythology that comes out of ancient civilization is simply the result of people from the time trying to explain phenomena that were, based on what was available to them, unexplainable. As our technology improved, so did the realism in our explanations, and it’s an ongoing process. While the things more recent generations have gotten wrong aren’t as fantastical as what our ancient counterparts came up with, new discoveries are still constantly shifting our understanding of the planet.
An example of this happening today can be found in the United States’ surveying community, as the NGS, is currently in the midst of a truly massive project to modernize the National Spatial Reference System based on (relatively) new insights about our world. This work has been going on for years now – though good luck finding an exact start date, as you’ll get different answers depending on how and who you ask – but we’re approaching the finish line for the bulk of the work.
To start, we’ll take a broad look at the modernization overall, including why it’s happening, how it’s happening, and what the results will be. Geo Week News spoke to Galen Scott, a Constituent Resources Manager with NGS who refers to his job as being a “Geek Translator,” as well as Dr. Chris Parrish, a professor with Oregon State’s College of Engineering and
GALEN SCOTT
Constituent Resources Manager, NGS
DR. CHRIS PARRISH
Director, Geospatial Center for Arctic and Pacific (GCAP)
Director of the Geospatial Center for the Arctic and Pacific (GCAP).
It’s worth starting with why this effort is happening in the first place, and what the modernized spatial reference system will replace. The answer to that second question is primarily what is known as NAD 83 and NAVD 88, the current horizontal and vertical reference frames, respectively. That leads into one of the major changes with this modernized system, too: There will no longer be separate horizontal and vertical systems, but rather an integrated system in which the dimensions “work together,” according to Scott.
The idea to start modernizing this system goes back to almost immediately after NAVD 88 was released. This was in 1991, and shortly after was when GPS started to become functional
and used for military purposes. In that time, Scott says scientists from NGS effectively figured out how to get around “selective availability” initiatives put in place around GPS, which essentially opened GPS up to the broader surveying community. The result was a broader understanding of the world around us, as alluded to at the top, leading to knowing we needed to make adjustments.
“The relationship between the type of heights in NAD 83 (ellipsoid heights) and the type of heights in NAVD 88 (orthometric heights) is a really simple equation, and works perfectly if both datums are free of systematic errors. Unfortunately, that equation doesn’t often work well in the case of NAD 83 and NAVD 88, partly due to systematic errors in NAD 83 and partly because of the old data in the geodetic leveling network – NAVD 88 – was comprised of 80 years of geodetic leveling that was all adjusted together with the assumption that nothing had moved,” Scott said.
“Of course stuff had moved, but it was the best we could do at the time; it was the best technology. But that idea of a GPS ellipsoid height, a geoid model, that’s what really came out of it, and that’s why we’re moving to a new system, because we’re now defining that new system through GPS ellipsoid heights and a new gravimetric geoid model, called GEOID2022.”
In terms of how this work is done, the geoid model is based on gravity, and for that you need measurements from the ground up. Scott said, “Gravity is a funny thing. You need observations on the ground, going out into space. Historically, we’ve had terrestrial gravity measurements for a long, long time. We’ve had satellites that have been up there for a while that give us satellite-based measurements. But what we needed was the middle portion of the gravity field, or airborne gravimetry.”
That’s exactly what NGS has been working to collect over the last 17 years with their GRAV-D program, for which they’ve been flying throughout the entire United States and its territories to collect gravity data. Scott relays that the work just finished up, with 100 percent of the original goal being completed in February of this year.
It’s important to note that this work doesn’t need to be done immediately lest we suffer grave consequences. There are some consequences we could be facing in the short-, medium-, and long-term by sticking to the current datums, but the current frames “are just fine for many of their intended purposes,” according to Scott. “The fact of the matter, though, is the technology has changed, and we can do better, and we should do better.”
Scott goes on to note that so much of our world – more than any other point in our history – is tied to spatial and location data. Accuracy is key, and with a system that doesn’t take into account any movement of the Earth, inaccuracy will inevitably grow over time. That said, there are some potential issues apparent today. Scott notes that in the Gulf region of Texas, for example, floodplain mapping is crucial, but on-theground reference points haven’t always been up-to-date. It’s easier to get those points up-to-date, though, with GPS-based surveying.
Dr. Parrish also spoke to this, reiterating that potential issues would only worsen over time. For example, he says, things like lidar point clouds may not be accepted because the software would recognize the reference frame inconsistency. He also noted some potentially larger issues. As an example, he notes that container ships continue to get larger, and just centimeters of draft (the depth of a vessel below the water) can be the difference between thousands of dollars of cargo. Therefore, shipping companies want to have as large of vessels as possible to maximize their loads, which in turn means we need to have highly accurate depth levels of these channels to ensure large vessels can navigate.
Dr. Parrish is leading the team at Oregon State and GCAP, who are one of four institutions – along with Michigan State University, Ohio State University, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography – selected to help advance this modernization effort from NGS. The institutions weren’t necessarily selected due to regional affiliation (two of the four institutions are from the Midwest, for example), but Dr. Parrish did note that the Pacific Northwest is particularly interesting in this respect given the tectonic activity along the Pacific Rim of Fire.
Through the rest of this report, we’ll be diving deeper into the work being done by Parrish and his team, with commentary from both that team and those at NGS who are doing similar work for the entire nation. This will include looking specifically at some of the work for this around hydrology, technical looks at GNSS-based projects, some applications and datums, and a crucial piece of the puzzle around outreach and education.
“Technologies rely on this question of where more than ever before. This science and this infrastructure that supports our ability to understand where is more important than ever.”
– Galen Scott, NGS
How the Effort to Modernize the National Spatial Reference System Affects Bathymetric Surveying
As an example, we can look at a more specific piece of this modernization work, focusing on bathymetric surveying. Geo Week News spoke to Charles Seaton of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission about a project he is working on as part of GCAP and how the modernization initiative fits into both this project specifically and bathymetric and hydrologic work more broadly.
CHARLES SEATON
Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish commission
While terrestrial work makes up the majority of surveying, bathymetric work is carving out an increasing portion of the industry’s attention for a couple of key reasons. One is that it’s simply become easier. Solutions that can do coastline and inland waterway surveying are significantly more accessible than ever before, as well as being more powerful. More importantly, our effects on the environment have become more clear (or at least more accepted) over the last few decades, and monitoring of these coastlines is one of the crucial pieces of environmental work.
Because of this growing importance, and growth within the field itself, it makes sense that hydrological work is being considered in the broader modernization project from NGS. Seaton, for his part, spoke with Geo Week News about a specific project he is working on, along with the Yakama Nation Fisheries Program and the US Army Corps of Engineers, around the Columbia River and Bonneville Dam. He’s been doing work in projects around this area for “basically [his] entire professional career.”
A lot of the conversation focused more broadly on bathymetry’s place in the modernization of the NSRS, and he said that from his perspective as a modeler the most important reason why hydrology is so crucial to this work
is that the datums determine the bathymetry. He went on to explain that it’s less important for local work where one can use datums that are location-specific – such as from a local tide gauge. It becomes a bigger problem once larger areas come to play, however.
“Because your surveys aren’t necessarily going to be done relative to your local datum, they’ll initially be done relative to a global tidal datum. By the time you get them, they’re likely to have been converted to some other datum, so being able to combine bathymetry across datums and have more accurate datums, it’s really important for having accurate bathymetry.”
He went on to explain that the differences between datums can be “quite substantial,” and it’s important to be careful that one is using the correct datums and converting between them correctly. Seaton said that NGS’s updates will improve this work and make it significantly easier.
“Having a good geoid model and a national spatial reference system, and having real-time systems for correcting to datum, allows you to collect bathymetry much more effectively.
Rather than having to establish a tide station and making sure that you’re not collecting your bathymetry too far from your tide stations, we’re able to just hook into the real-time network and determine the vertical position of our sensor instantaneously as we’re collecting data, so that we’re generating bathymetry data that is referenced to the geoid.”
Interestingly, Seaton noted that the modeling community has not reliably been using the NAD 83 and NAVD 88 datums that are being replaced in this current modernization effort, instead relying on NGVD 29. Those numbers represent the years they were created, meaning this system is nearly a century old at this point. Still, while the newer datums were certainly an
upgrade for terrestrial surveying, NGVD 29 has proven more valuable for hydrological work.
“Despite all of its serious problems as a surveying datum, its one good feature is that it is directly tied to mean sea level all across the US and Canadian costs,” Seaton said. “That means that if you have bathymetry and it’s relative to NGVD 29, or your convert it to being relative to NGVD 29, then it approximates the datum zero being mean sea level, which is very valuable for doing ocean modeling because your vertical zero is mean sea level.”
Now, they’re shifting towards using the geoid model as the datum, which Seaton said does “something similar to NGVD 29 in terms of having a fixed gravitational surface that approximates mean sea level.”
Seaton is working with Dr. Parrish and others on applying bathymetric work around the Columbia River, and he told Geo Week News that they will be linking bathymetric surveys to a national datum, something he described as “fairly new.” He and the rest of the team will develop procedures for that work with less experienced crews.
This work is still in its relatively early stages – Seaton pegs a roughly five-year timeline for this particular project to develop a hydrodynamic model for the Bonneville Pool – but
he sees real advantages for bathymetric work in general with the new geoid model and the modernized NSRS. Since this work is generally less stable than terrestrial surveying – the landscape changes far less frequently than coastal areas – the ability of the new geoid model to help integrate historical data in a more reliable fashion is valuable.
“Being able to apply the modernized spatial reference system to allow us to collect data where we need it, I think is a really important change.”
“Every time we go and talk about this at some of the more general engineering meetings, they look at us crazy when we talk about the losing a foot.”
– Michael Olsen, Oregon State University
The Central Place of GNSS in the Effort to Modernize the National Spatial Reference System
How does GNSS fit in this modernization effort? As discussed above, GNSS is really at the heart of this entire effort, as satellites have transformed the way surveying can be done, a process that has only continued to grow as satellite launches become more accessible and more data is available. For this section, we spoke with Brian Weaver, an assistant professor and senior researcher with Oregon State University, Chase Simpson, a senior instructor of geomatics at Oregon State University, and Dan Gillins, Chief of Spatial Reference Systems Divisions with NGS.
Before getting into the specific work being done by the GCAP team around GNSS, it’s worth taking a brief look at the extent to which GNSS has altered surveying. NGS’s Galen Scott told Geo Week News that, shortly after the modernization effort in the 1980s is when GPS really started to become a viable, publicly available option for surveyors, and it was immediately clear that the industry would need to adjust. In some ways, this current modernization effort started at that point. Quite simply, the data from GNSS was noticeably more accurate than previous datums, and NGS has been trying to catch up since.
BRIAN WEAVER
Senior Researcher, Oregon State University
CHASE SIMPSON
Senior Instructor of Geomatics, Oregon State University
DAN GILLINS
Chief of Spatial Reference Systems Divisions, NGS
Gillins told Geo Week News, “GNSS has been such a disruptive technology. In my opinion, it’s changed just about everything we do at NGS.” Weaver backed that up, calling GNSS “the key to everything” in relation to modern surveying.
GCAP was given a series of eight “tasks” relating to this modernization effort to help achieve the objectives of a grant
they received from NGS. Unsurprisingly given the importance of GNSS to the overall modernization undertaking, half of those tasks in some way fall under this umbrella. One of the big tasks, for which Weaver serves as the lead, was around the OPUS Projects, a service provided by NGS.
OPUS is at the center of much of this modernization effort, particularly when it comes to GNSS’ role in the project. OPUS, or the Online Positioning User Service, as explained by Simpson is “the method for users to access the NSRS. When NGS creates all of these tools and products for doing GNSS processing, it’s all being routed through OPUS.”
OPUS has been around since before this modernization effort really ramped up in recent years, but it’s only been taking in data from GPS satellites, not the entirety of the global GNSS systems. Right now, there are three different services within OPUS, with a static service, a rapid static service, and OPUS Projects. More recently, they’ve introduced a new version of OPUS, currently in beta, which includes multi-GNSS processing.
Gillins told Geo Week News regarding this new step for OPUS, “We’re building a new version of OPUS that can process data from BeiDou, Galileo, GLONASS, and GPS. Our expectation is that the results will be a little more accurate, you’ll be able to work in areas that have less satellite visibility than before, and you can hopefully just get more work done more efficiently.”
For GCAP’s part, in simplest terms the team is working to make sure that the new OPUS version works as intended. Weaver said, “NGS has done a lot of evaluations. Even for my master’s degree at OSU, we did a lot of evaluations with OPUS. But the OPUS version that uses MPAGES is a little bit untested. They did a lot of internal tests at NGS, but they would like to see some more concrete publications and statistically meaningful results, focusing on the hopefully improved performance with multi-GNSS processing, and also to confirm that the switch from that double difference approach to the single difference approach is working as expected.”
In addition to the work around OPUS, the other major project around GNSS with respect to the modernization effort is focusing on a service for real-time network alignment. More specifically, the GCAP team is working to create more automated processes for positioning reference stations in the real-time network.
Simpson said, “We needed to find a better way to update the positions of the reference stations in the real-time network. What we ended up doing was having a follow-on
study that was really just diving into the ways that we can try to automate the process of computing new positions for these stations. Managing real-time networks can be pretty time consuming, mostly for the file management side of things where you have to compile all that data to get it into a standardized format.”
Right now, that work is largely localized to the Pacific Northwest, starting with a project for a service that can be used by the Oregon Department of Transportation. Eventually, Simpson says, they hope to grow things gradually to Washington, and then California, and gradually move east from there.
This kind of real-time network alignment service is something that is not currently offered by NGS, but it is something that they see as a value-add for the organization. In short, these RTN services are what aligns data with the NSRS, so there’s clear value from NGS’s perspective around this kind of service. Gillins said, “The idea of this real-time network alignment service or tool is it provides real-time network managers a way to help them make sure that their network is in the NSRS, and that the coordinates they’re broadcasting are correct. That way, everybody’s collecting data in the same datums and thereby referencing their work in the same system.”
These real-time network alignment services are provided by some network managers, whether it be public organizations like a DOT or National Park, or in the private sector. However, any service from NGS shouldn’t be viewed as competition, but rather a service for these network providers, according to Gillins. “We would just provide a service to them if they want to make sure that their network is in the NSRS or not.”
This work is extremely comprehensive, and as one would imagine with GCAP there is quite a bit of collaboration and overlap between these GNSS-related tasks on their docket. And it’s work that energizes the whole group, according to Simpson. “I was really excited when NGS released this geospatial modeling grant. I think it enables us to really push the work that NGS is doing, and push it on more of a national level of at least the GNSS side of positioning.”
To put it in relatively simple terms, GNSS is one of two main prongs of this modernization effort. There is the GEOID model, which Scott discussed with Geo Week News in the high-level article linked at the top of this page, and then there is GNSS. “If you try to really boil everything down into super nuts and bolts of what the modernized NSRS is, the two critical components of it are the GNSS and GEOID model,” Gillins said.
The Geospatial Industry Is Getting Ready for the Modernized National Spatial Reference System
How is the geospatial industry preparing for this shift?
Geo Week sought insights from Phil Gershkovich, the President and Owner of Cooper Aerial Surveys. Cooper is a provider of topographic survey and mapping data for clients across a number of industries throughout North America. Gershkovich also serves on the board of directors for the Management Association for Private Photogrammetric Surveyors, or MAPPS. In this capacity, he recently moderated a panel discussion featuring speakers from NGS designed to answer questions from those in the community about this modernization effort.
Gershkovich was able to speak with Geo Week News about what kinds of issues the attendees – which included representatives from some of the largest geospatial companies in the nation such as Dewberry, Woolpert, and others – raised to NGS representatives, and what he personally sees as questions he has in his capacity in the geospatial industry. He also relayed some of the benefits he sees from his standpoint about this modernization effort.
PHIL GERSHKOVICH President and Owner, Cooper Aerial Surveys
As one would expect, there was seemingly a bit of apprehension about the changing of the NSRS. That’s almost a given any time long-term, established norms are going to be changed, particularly for an older industry – both in terms of how long the industry has been around and the average age of the sector. Generally speaking, it seems the questions from those within the industry revolved around data conversion and how different states will respond to the modernization, as well as how manufacturers will adapt. These are all issues
that NGS has in mind during this process, and it’s telling that these are the topics that are top of mind for the geospatial professionals who will be most affected by the modernization efforts.
That’s certainly not to say that it’s all apprehension around these efforts from the industry, and Gershkovich himself sees a few specific positives that could come from these modernization efforts. Perhaps most prominently, he foresees these changes fostering a better relationship between the surveying and GIS communities.
He told Geo Week News, “This new datum is going to allow GIS and surveyors to work better together, because now these projections are going to be defined – they’re all going to be low-distortion projections. You don’t have to do these conversions between grid and ground.”
One other theme that came out of our conversation with Gershkovich is that a large portion of the geospatial industry in the U.S. remains unaware of the changes coming to the NSRS. Reaching these communities is a major focus of efforts from both NGS and GCAP, and it’s a difficult nut to crack. There is going to be an adjustment period from those in the industry at the end of this process, but that adjustment will be more or less significant depending on how much preparation time professionals have ahead of the changes going through.
There are plenty of reasons why this news isn’t necessarily reaching all corners of the industry, and Gershkovich notes that one of the big ones is that some in the industry are trending away from licensure, and as a result continuing education programs aren’t as strong as they once were.
Right now, a lot of the onus on keeping up with the latest developments in the sector is on the professional themselves, and even those with the best intentions don’t always have the time to partake in these educational sessions unless it’s specifically mandated.
Even with some of the apprehension, along with a general lack of awareness in some corners, many in the industry still have excitement about some of the elements with this modernization process. It will take time to adjust, but the benefits will ultimately come out of the process for those who make the adjustments. For Gershkovich, whose background and education is in GIS, that aforementioned bridging of GIS and survey stands out in what he’s heard about the modernization efforts so far, and he feels it really has the
potential to change the industry for the better.
“I think as [these new datums] become more and more prominent, survey and GIS are going to come together –hopefully stronger – and recognize each other’s strengths and weaknesses and make the geospatial industry stronger.”
“NGS can do the science, but it’s really up to us to take it further.”
– Qassim Abdullah, Woolpert
How Industry Experts are Preparing Professionals for the Modernization of the National Spatial Reference System
Dr. Chris Parrish and Dr. Michael Olsen – both professors of geomatics at Oregon State – have been undergoing work at GCAP as part of their $6.5 million grant from NGS, which involves a great deal of outreach to industry professionals. Through our discussion, the professors touched on some of the most important pieces of the modernization for professionals to know, the challenge of covering all potential applications, and initiatives to highlight the benefits of this effort.
In talking about one of the biggest questions they are getting in preparation for this change, Dr. Parrish points to some potential issues with geospatial software solutions that could arise if they aren’t addressed ahead of time. One of the big components of this modernization effort is around “time-dependent coordinates,” with coordinates having two epochs associated with them. This is a crucial piece of the effort – “As positioning has continued to get more and more accurate, we can no longer ignore the fact that coordinates are moving in time,” Dr. Parrish said – but it can also lead to some issues with the software.
MICHAEL
OLSEN Professor of Geomatics, Oregon State
“On the side of helping people prepare, we know that there are things in geospatial software and file formats that may break if we don’t address them now and get ahead of things that will happen through NSRS modernization,” Dr. Parrish told Geo Week News. “An example of that is that some of our software and file formats may not currently support time-dependent
coordinates, which are a big part of [the modernization effort].”
This exemplifies why outreach and education is such a big part of this project, as simply being aware of what is going to change will be half the battle in ensuring smooth operations after the rollout. GCAP has been working with a number of industry groups, including one working group with ASPRS focused specifically around this NSRS modernization effort.
That outreach can be a major challenge when it comes to this effort, though, given the ever-increasing number of sectors that are utilizing spatial data for their workflows. There’s a ton of examples of ‘non-traditional’ industries who will be affected by this, including, as Dr. Olsen points out, the autonomous vehicle sector.
“They don’t have a geomatic background. Their eyes glaze over when you start talking about these things, but it becomes critical in this application, especially when you start thinking about a vehicle crossing a state boundary, going from one realtime network to another,” Dr. Olsen said. “It really needs to be seamless for that kind of technology to work. Those people writing the code and programming the systems and testing them need to be aware of these things and really test it out.”
Despite all of the challenges that can arise from trying to do outreach and address applications across so many disparate industries, the group from GCAP clearly sees the benefits of this. Going back to the idea of these time-dependent coordinates, Dr. Erzhuo Che – an assistant professor at Oregon State – talked about the future-proofing this could provide.
“We accumulated massive amounts of data in the past, and we cannot go back in time to fix things and recollect that data,” he told Geo Week News. “While we cannot fix the data in the past, if we can advocate the proper way of reporting that data now, even if we have a new datum coming out in 20, 30, 50 years, we will still be able to come back to right now and still be okay because we are doing this future proofing.”
DR. ERZHUO CHE Assistant Professor, Oregon State
As part of this effort, the GCAP team wants to hear from the community about success stories already seen with these new datums (NGS has beta and alpha releases out now) or how people can see this being a benefit.
“One of the things we’re really focused on is what we’re calling our ‘NSRS modernization success stories,’ trying to capture these stories from across the geospatial industry with anybody who has examples of how the increased accuracy, data interoperability, and data sustainability enabled by the modernized NSRS and how it will help their work.”
Professionals with these success stories can reach out directly to Dr. Parrish, or through the ASPRS NSRS Working Group.
It is, of course, no small task trying to find procedures for this evolving NSRS in the wide swatch of geospatial applications around today, but Dr. Parrish points to real value in the effort.
“I think the geospatial community can greatly benefit from coming together and having a forum where we can discuss reference frames, geoid models, projects, coordinate transformations. These things can be tricky and can be done in a number of different ways. There can be inconsistencies, and I’m hoping this is a springboard to do multiple things – getting the industry ready for the new NSRS, and creating an outreach group that can keep these discussions going – simultaneously.”
“Historically, we have
referenced those datums through survey marks, through passive marks in the ground - we’ve been doing that for 200 years.
One of the issues with that is that once you put that mark in the ground, you don’t know how it is moving unless you re-survey it periodically… which can allow things to get inconsistent.” – Galen Scott, NGS
How NGS and GCAP are Working to Get the Word Out Around the Modernized NSRS
In speaking with representatives from both the NGS and GCAP, it’s become clear that working on the technical aspects of this shift is far from the only heavy lift involved in the project. Arguably as importantly, there has been a lot of work going into educating the industry about the changes that are coming and finding ways to simply raise awareness of the changes. That’s one of the focuses for Caixia Wang, an associate professor and chair at the geomatics department with the University of Alaska-Anchorage and part of GCAP, and she told Geo Week News that it starts with general education.
“I think the idea is that we want to first understand the need in continuing education in geomatics from a broader audience. We started with a survey on this kind of discussion, and distributed that to not just the students and faculty, but the industry in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. We started just
CAIXIA WANG Associate Professor and Chair, Geomatics, University of Alaska-Anchorage
to try and understand the need, and then we are going to build our initiatives based on those present needs first.”
That survey is the same one that Oregon State’s Chase Simpson mentioned in a webinar with Geo Week News earlier this year. Anyone in the geospatial industry is welcome to fill that out here.
Everybody Geo Week News spoke with about this education and outreach noted that conferences are the best way to get this information in front of the various professionals. Galen Scott, Constituent Resources Manager with NGS, tells Geo Week News that the organization has a “NSRS Modernization Engagement Strategy” team, and a big part of their work is heading to a variety of conferences within the industry to get the word out. That, of course, includes Geo Week along with a myriad of others throughout the year, ranging from broad geospatial-focused shows to those targeting more specific industries, such as the transportation sector.
All of those different specific industries being affected by this modernization effort presents a challenge for this outreach work, though. Michael Olsen, a Professor of Geomatics with Oregon State University, talked about this with Geo Week News.
“We’re trying to bring the surveying community and all of these different organizations together,” he said. “They can be very fragmented, but with a lot of overlap in terms of what they’re doing, though each organization has their different focus. At the Surveying and Geomatics Conference that we hosted at OSU this past June, we had a panel at the end of really trying to have that hard conversation: How can we put aside these turf wars that have happened in the past and really be part of the same thing?”
Beyond attending industry events, these organizations are still looking for other ways to build awareness of this major change. According to Scott, the level of awareness is still lower to where NGS would like to see. He says that one of the big strategies he and his team are working with is what he calls “force multipliers.” He notes that they can realistically only speak to so many people, so they are relying on other people to then get the word out to their networks, creating something of an exponential growth of awareness.
Regardless of the relative lack of awareness now, the modernized NSRS is coming and Scott doesn’t believe there is any value to delaying in order to build more of that awareness. Instead, he says those who are paying attention and are immediately ready for the change will be able to reap serious early benefits.
“There’s value to be derived from it immediately. Once we release it, it’s going to make a major difference for large-scale
surveying and mapping firms. There are going to be people who have been paying attention that can jump on it, and those who haven’t heard about it, they’ll hear about it. It’ll take them some time to transition, but eventually, they’ll start to reap those benefits as well.”
Looking more long-term, this could also be an opportunity to change the way the geospatial and surveying communities deal with things like continuing education, according to Oregon State’s Ezra Che.
“There are some challenges in the whole workflow and how things work in the industry,” Che told Geo Week News. “We have to get the stakeholders. They’ll hire surveyors, and they’ll trust the surveyors they hire and the software they use. They don’t have any liability on those, because the surveyor signs off on those so the surveyor is responsible. But the surveyor, all they need is the license and to get a license. They don’t necessarily get the latest updates of everything – the tools, the method, the datums, including the NSRS, because it’s upcoming. Some of those important aspects are not in the feedback loop within the industry.”
That gets to the crux of the challenge for these groups that are looking to get the word out about this modernized NSRS. It could be time to look at more sustainable changes to help the industry keep up with other changes coming down the line that could affect their workflows. In the meantime, more pressing to this specific issue around the modernized NSRS, look out for representatives from NGS and/or GCAP at any geospatial-focused conference over the next year – including Geo Week in February 2026 – as they will be happy to answer any questions or address any concerns around this effort, and help professionals get ready for the upcoming shift.
