Desurveyed

Desurveyed is the past tense and past participle of desurvey, a term used primarily in surveying, cartography, and related fields. Desurveying refers to the act of undoing, retracting, or nullifying a previously conducted survey or its results. This can involve removing survey data from records, cancelling a published plat, or reversing changes to a property's boundaries.

In practice, desurveying may occur when a survey is found to be erroneous, when legal conditions change, or when more accurate measurements replace earlier work. Desurveying often requires documentation, legal approvals, and updating geographic information systems (GIS) and maps to reflect that the prior survey is no longer valid for current purposes. In data management contexts, desurveyed datasets are those from which survey observations or measurements have been excised, sometimes to avoid inconsistencies or to prepare a revised dataset for re-survey.

The term is specialized and not commonly used outside professional surveying, GIS, and archival contexts; some practitioners may instead describe the action as revoking, invalidating, or revising a survey. Etymologically, it combines the prefix de- (reversal) with survey, aligning with similar terms that denote undoing an earlier measurement or mapping activity.

Examples are found in project notes and legal records, such as a jurisdiction desurveying a boundary after a dispute or a survey team desurveying older measurements in favor of a new topographic survey. See also survey, desurvey.