Reports to NGS - How Long ago is Too Long?

[monkeykat]

I was looking through some of my benchmark recoveries, and I noticed that I had not submitted a few recoveries to the NGS I made in December 2006. It got me thinking, what is the recommended "expiration date" for submitting a recovery to NGS? The recovery form prompts you for the date of recovery, so technically even though its April, I think I could submit a 12,24,2006 recovery.

 

I suspect that since these particular recoveries were so long ago (Over 2 months) it would probably be best to verify they are still there all over again. In this particular case, someone has logged these marks to NGS recently (within the last 2 yrs) so the point is really mute for these marks. But, I bring this up as a reference and to look for a general consensus.

 

Any thoughts on an expiration? 1 month? A week? Anything over a month and you should do a driveby to verify nothing has changed before submitting?

[mloser]

My opinion is that if it is decently newer than the previous recovery it is probably worth submitting. If you submit it with the December date that will be the recovery date, and will be valid as of that date, no matter when you actually submit it. I would especially submit it if there were significant changes from the previous recovery, as your description may be much more helpful. If, however, you have reason to believe that the area has changed significantly in the time since you visited, another visit and recovery may be warranted.

 

I have seriously considered going back and submitting recoveries for some of my very early marks that I didn't submit at the time. Based on some postings here about how often to submit I had decided that anything post-1978 was too recent, or if the area had not changed ("Found as described"), and now I realize that was a flawed theory. I still think that recoveries every year or two is overkill, but NOT submitting a 1942 mark because nothing had changed is also a mistake. Just knowing that a mark has been recovered recently would help me if I was a surveyor--I would be more likely to head to a 1942 mark with a 2004 recovery than to a 1942 mark without a recent one.

[monkeykat]

Hah! You are totally right, no matter when I actually make the submission, as long as I date it the time I actually recovered it, then the entry in the NGS will be correct as of that time. Brilliant! Even if it gets destroyed the day after, it will still have been a correct recovery on the date I submitted. Funny I didn't look at it that way. Must be this "Left" brain of mine.

[Wintertime]

I was asking myself the same question recently about some marks I recovered last year. Like mloser, I finally realized that all I was reporting was that the disk was okay as of the date I found it, and given that my information was maybe 20 years more recent than the previous entry, it would still be helpful. So I went ahead and submitted them.

 

Patty

[Z15]

I have done that several times. One I came across was several years old. I went to the NGS site to see if anyone else had found it since. They had not, so I sent it in with the date of the recovery. If you put todays date, it would not accurate or true.

[+PFF]

Recently, I discovered that several of my 2006 recoveries had never made it into the NGS database, for reasons unknown. I got the "all clear" from Deb, and resubmitted them with the original date.

 

In another instance, the "missing recovery notes" were about two years old. Since they were not far from home, I revisited the site and verified their condition before resubmitting (with the current date).

 

Along the same lines, the NC Geodetic Survey often makes submissions to NGS in batches, with some of the entries being up to five years old. (Usually, these are newly monumented marks. At other times, they are "missing/destroyed" recovery reports.)

 

As mentioned above, the really important things are that the DATE OF RECOVERY accurately reflects the time period of the observation, and that we stay within the guidelines for "frequency of recovery", especially when nothing has changed from the previous entry.

 

-Paul-

Edited April 27, 2007 by PFF