Total station surveys are a widely used method to survey topography. With applications ranging from traditional land surveying. Land form evolution monitoring. To land use monitoring. In the geosciences and bio- logical sciences, total stations are now becoming standard tools in monitoring geomorphic change detection of rivers. Streams. Beaches. And mass wasting of hill slopes. Since many total station surveys are now undertaken in remote and/or undeveloped localities, there is often not an established local control network tied to a projected real world coordinate system. Thus, many of these surveys are done from a un- projected local assumed coordinate system.

However, as GIS has become more of an everyday tool for visualization, modeling and analysis of topographic data. There is an increasing demand for such surveys. World coordinate system. Transforming total station surveys from unprojected local assumed coordinate system to real world coordinates makes the power of overlaying those data with other datasets (e.g., aerial imagery, vector datasets of roads, political boundaries, etc.) and certain analyses possible.

There are various built-in and add-in tools to perform transformations through GIS programs. This paper studies the effect of using Georeferencing tool, Spatial Adjustment tool (Affine and similarity) and Champ tool on the precision and relative accuracy of total station survey. This transformation requires real- world co-ordinates of at least two control points, which can be collected from different sources. This paper also studies the effect of using geodetic GPS, hand-held GPS, Google Earth (GE) and Bing maps as sources for control points on the precision and Base relative accuracy of total station survey.