ABSTRACT
The word ‘planning’ comes from the Latin planus, meaning a plain or an area which is all visible. This well expresses the objective of the planning stage of a terrain survey. The aim is usually to obtain the environmental data for some form of development, such as road building, irrigation, or landscaping, within acceptable cost constraints. The plan must include the outline of all the work to be completed before it is actually implemented. The normal sequence of operations in the survey is:
Preliminary definition and programming of specialized skills, critical path analysis, and literature orientation;
Assessment of land by remote sensing;
Field sampling;
Laboratory analysis of soil, water, and vegetation samples;
Data processing;
Presentation of results.
