Government
Manage Crown land, plan municipal infrastructure, and dispatch emergency responders — all using the legal land descriptions that are already in your records.
Contact sales for Business or Enterprise API pricing.
The problems government professionals run into
Crown land records use legal land descriptions exclusively
Provincial Crown land inventories, grazing leases, mineral rights allocations, and timber permits are documented by DLS or NTS notation — not GPS coordinates. A grazing lease in the Alberta foothills reads NE 14-062-04W5, not 53.7291° N, 115.8834° W. When lands officers, Crown prosecutors, or GIS analysts need to map those parcels, verify boundaries, or respond to a tenure dispute, they need GPS coordinates derived from the legal description. There is no shortcut built into the provincial Crown land management systems.
Municipal planning needs parcel-level spatial data
Zoning decisions, road improvement projects, utility corridor planning, and subdivision approvals all depend on knowing exactly where each parcel sits. Municipal property records and assessment rolls store legal land descriptions — DLS quarter sections or NTS blocks — without GPS coordinates attached. Before a planner can map a proposed rezoning or a public works team can stake a road widening, someone converts those descriptions to spatial data. When that step involves hundreds of parcels from a tax roll or an infrastructure asset list, doing it one address at a time stops the project.
Environmental assessments reference specific parcels
Environmental impact assessments, contaminated site registries under provincial environmental management acts, and remediation project files identify locations by legal land description. Field teams from provincial environment ministries or consulting firms contracted by government need GPS coordinates to visit those sites, place monitoring equipment, and collect samples. The legal description in the registry file is the authoritative identifier — but it doesn't go directly into a field GPS unit.
Emergency response requires fast location identification
When a pipeline rupture, wildfire front, or flood event is described by legal land descriptions — as first responders, pipeline operators, and provincial emergency management offices typically document them — dispatchers and incident commanders need GPS coordinates immediately. A rural structure fire at SW 07-035-20W4 cannot wait for a manual lookup. Delays in converting the location add minutes to response times in areas where road access is already limited.
How Township Canada fits the government workflow
Crown land and parcel lookup
Enter any DLS or NTS description and get GPS coordinates with boundary outlines overlaid on the survey grid map. Verify parcel locations for grazing leases, mineral rights allocations, or timber permits before issuing, amending, or disputing a tenure.
Example: A provincial lands officer enters NE 14-062-04W5 to locate a grazing lease parcel northwest of Edson, Alberta. The map shows the quarter section boundary, confirms the parcel sits within the expected range, and returns the centroid coordinates ready to copy into the Crown land management database.
Search guide · DLS to GPS converter
Batch conversion for land inventories
Upload a CSV with hundreds or thousands of parcel descriptions from Crown land databases, municipal property records, or assessment rolls. Map columns to the relevant legal description fields — whether descriptions are stored as full strings or split across township, range, and meridian columns. Every parcel gets GPS coordinates in one pass, and any descriptions that fail to resolve are flagged so data errors surface before they reach a GIS system or a regulatory submission.
Example: A municipality uploads 800 parcel descriptions from its tax assessment roll and maps them all in minutes. The GIS team imports the resulting coordinates into their spatial database and begins identifying parcels affected by a proposed road corridor — work that previously required days of manual data entry.
Export to GIS formats
Download converted locations as Shapefile for ArcGIS or QGIS, GeoJSON for web mapping applications, KML for Google Earth, DXF for engineering drawings, or CSV for database imports. Municipal GIS teams and provincial ministry analysts can import directly into existing spatial databases without format conversion.
Survey grid map layers — township, section, quarter section, LSD, and NTS — provide visual context for every parcel and let staff verify locations against the survey grid before the data moves downstream.
API for government systems
The RESTful API integrates legal land description conversion directly into internal government applications — emergency dispatch systems, Crown land management platforms, municipal planning tools, and environmental monitoring databases. The Search endpoint accepts a legal description string and returns GPS coordinates and parcel geometry. The Batch endpoint processes arrays of descriptions in parallel. The Maps endpoint serves vector tiles for the DLS survey grid so ministry and municipal GIS teams can overlay the survey grid on any map application built with Mapbox, MapLibre, Leaflet, or OpenLayers.
Automating the conversion step removes a manual bottleneck from every workflow that links a legal description in one system to a spatial location in another.
API documentation · API integration guide
Recommended plan
Business plan for municipal governments and provincial departments that need batch processing, all export formats, and team management so multiple staff share access under one account.
Enterprise API access for departments integrating legal land description conversion into internal systems — high-volume API with dedicated support, usage reporting, and the option to discuss security and deployment requirements directly with the team.
Contact us about government pricing
Government organizations often have specific procurement and security requirements. The sales team can assist with volume pricing, enterprise agreements, and deployment options that fit institutional IT policies.
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