Surveying is daytime work — especially if it invokes today’s remarkable high-tech geospatial mapping and navigational tools, known collectively as geographic information systems (GIS). Nighttime or off-hours duties aren’t usually associated with it.

Yet those are exactly what many land surveyors have shouldered lately — as members of one or more of their professional associations — as they attempt to cogently address the legislative and political issues facing the profession.

Now more than ever, surveyors are organizing politically and lobbying government on multiple levels with respect to a range of developing issues. Often these involve the very new technology that enables GIS, such as satellites and drones.

But it is something of a challenge for surveyors to weigh in politically: They are not normally regarded as political animals, nor even much known for their public personas. Many regard interactions with government above the local, municipal level as unnecessary.

Yet some foreboding, even threatening, issues do loom for them, both state-by-state and nationally.

How do surveyors’ state and national professional associations reasonably monitor the action at many levels of government? How do they "survey" the landscape of, say, changing regulations; budget revisions; and regulation of the all-important new technologies?

Seemingly, they have started with the recognition that whether they are initiating, favoring or opposing new rules or legislation, the job only gets more involved with time; is invariably a long process; and that getting the profession’s voice heard takes not only patience but plenty of money and effort. The point is to stay out in front of the issues affecting surveyors' physical and business environments.

In doing so, at least, they have wisely granted that surveying is not unlike so many other professions.

"It has become a full-time operation to keep a watchful eye at all government levels," writes Tim Burch, a professional surveyor in Rosemont, Illinois, in a recent blog post on GPS World. There, he is a co-contributing editor for surveying.

Burch is active in government affairs within both the Illinois Professional Land Surveyors Association (IPLSA), for which he is chairman of the government affairs committee, and the national surveying society, for which he is the executive board’s secretary. "It’s taking a small army of people to keep abreast of all situations," wrote Burch.

The blog regularly provides a snapshot of the "action item list" of the national society’s Joint Government Affairs Committee. The snapshot’s purpose is to give members and the public at least a sampling of not just "the seemingly endless battles being waged on Capitol Hill by the society and its members nationwide," but of pertinent matters across the country.

Currently, anti-regulatory fervor in Washington would seem obstructive of maintenance of the electronic infrastructure, known as the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), that has become so instrumental in surveying and other fields.

GNSS is the catch-all term for satellite navigation systems providing autonomous geographic and geospatial positioning on a global basis (including, for example, the GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, Beidou and other regional systems).

These enable the geospatial applications crucial to surveyors’ work. Essentially, the apps have allowed surveying to evolve into a fairly technical profession, with GNSS as its core data collection method.

The issues that the committee is addressing, and hence the agenda items it is pushing, mostly revolve around the GNSS and how data is collected with it. But how those systems collect data is only part of the focus. Another part is highlighting the necessity of large-scale data collection in order for surveyors to provide adequate services to U.S. inhabitants.

The committee believes — like the nation’s infrastructure generally — that both the data collected so far and the standards for data collection are aging, worn out and lacking in resolution and detail. The actions the national society is pursuing politically, on several fronts, correspond to initiating serious upgrades to these elements that are simply long overdue, and correcting their other shortcomings, if any.

Of course, the point is basically for surveyors to stay engaged, to remain informed and ready on a wide range of issues — especially since government functions or initiatives (especially those of the U.S. government) lie more and more at the center of maintaining and improving GNSS data collection technology.