SURVEY ENGINEERING AND MAPPING TECHNICAL CENTER OF EXPERTISE
The Survey Engineering and Mapping Technical Center of Expertise (TCX) under the Army Geospatial Center was originally established in the mid 1990’s to provide the USACE with expert knowledge in the various areas of surveying and mapping. With the advancement of GNSS and related surveying tools, this Center provided the USACE with the necessary research and development, training, and guidance to fully implement this new technology leading to efficient and accurate survey data collection solutions. The Center’s ability to apply this to other advances in surveying and mapping activities has made it a very successful program and resource for USACE divisions, districts, and labs.
Center activities have included the following:
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Digital Project Notebook (now the Corps Project Notebook)
- Inland Electronic Navigational Charts
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National Inventory of Dams
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Comprehensive Evaluation of Project Datums
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USACE Survey Monument Archival and Retrieval Tool (U--SMART)
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Comprehensive Evaluation of Projects with Respect to Sea Level Change
Current TCX Programs:
Inland Electronic Navigational Charting (https://ienccloud.us/)
Development of Inland Electronic Navigational Charts (IENCs) to cover the Mississippi River and tributaries thus began in 2001 with pilot projects on the Atchafalaya River in Louisiana and Lower Mississippi River near Vicksburg, Mississippi. These projects, which involved a combination of in-house and contract activities, were the first efforts to collect and convert inland waterway data, commonly used for river and channel maintenance, into the international S-57 hydrographic data exchange. This highly structured data format is commonly used for electronic chart applications and is currently used for Corps IENCs.
National Inventory of Dams (https://nid.sec.usace.army.mil)
The National Inventory of Dams (NID) is a congressionally authorized database, which documents dams in the U.S. and its territories. The NID was most recently reauthorized in the America's Water Infrastructure Act of 2018. The NID includes information on more than 91,000 dams that are more than 25 feet high, hold more than 50 acre-feet of water, or are considered a significant hazard if they fail. The NID is maintained and published by USACE, in cooperation with the Association of State Dam Safety Officials (ASDSO), the states and territories, and federal dam-regulating agencies. The database contains more than 70 data fields with information about the dam’s location, size, purpose, type, last inspection, regulatory facts, and other technical data. Beginning in FY19, USACE supplemented the NID funding to expand the features and information for USACE dams to include additional risk information and flood inundation maps. With this change, the NID technical architecture and web site migrated to the National Levee Database platform and the support of the USACE Dam and Levee Safety Data Management Team.
USACE Surveying Monument Archival and Retrieval Tool (U-SMART) (https://usmart.sec.usace.army.mil)
The purpose of U-SMART is to provide a centralized system for USACE and Army surveyors to manage and view survey monuments, to include Control Point data and boundary monuments, and make sure that the latest values for these control points are current and up-to-date, relative to the National Spatial Reference System (NSRS), for the associated project. For more details on this database see the U-SMART page on the AGC web site:
https://agc.usace.afpims.mil/What-we-do/U-SMART/
Guidance Documents and Resources:
The TCX has been involved in the development and maintenance of several USACE policy and guidance documents related to surveying and mapping. Here is a list and links to these documents:
Engineering And Construction Bulletins (ECB)
USACE ECB 2023-3 Use Of National Geodetic Survey NCAT And VDatum Instead Of CORPSCON
USACE 2021-15 The Transfer of Data Collected by Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) Devices onto CorpsNet
Engineer Regulations (ER)
ER 1110-2-8160 Policies for Referencing Project Elevation Grades to Nationwide Vertical Datums
ER 1110-1-8170 Policies for using the USACE Survey Monument Archival and Retrieval Tool (USMART) for Project Control and Boundary Monumentation
Engineer Manuals (EM)
EM 1110-1-1000 Photogrammetric and LiDAR Mapping
EM 1110-1-1002 Survey Marks and Monumentation
EM 1110-1-1003 Navstar Global Positioning Systems Surveying
EM 1110-1-1005 Control and Topographic Surveying
EM 1110-1-2910 Remote Sensing
EM 1110-2-1003 Hydrographic Surveying
EM 1110-2-1009 Structural Deformation Surveying
EM 1110-2-6056 Standards and Procedures for Referencing Project Elevation Grades to Nationwide Vertical Datums
Are you looking for CORPSCON?
CORPSCON is no longer supported or updated. USACE recommends using the existing datum conversion and coordinated conversion tools developed by the NOAA NGS, specifically the NGS Coordinate Conversion and Transformation Tool (NCAT), https://geodesy.noaa.gov/NCAT/ and NOAA/NOS Vertical Datum Transformation tool (VDatum), https://vdatum.noaa.gov/welcome.html for performing horizontal and/or vertical datum transformations and coordinate conversions.
Point of Contact for More Information on this TCX
If you have any issues or questions, please contact us at usmart@usace.army.mil
USACE Users Only: Visit the Surveying and Mapping Community of Practice SharePoint for discussion on various USACE surveying and mapping activities (https://usace.dps.mil/sites/KMP-TS)