185 Oscar Trek™ units transformed Nigeria's national cadastral survey

Nigeria's Federal Ministry of Lands initiated a nationwide cadastral modernization program in late 2024, aiming to formalize land tenure across a country where an estimated 70% of parcels lacked legal documentation. The project required boundary verification at centimeter precision across urban, semi-urban, and rural terrains — often in areas with poor connectivity, limited base station infrastructure, and challenging GNSS environments like dense forests and urban canyons.

Traditional pole-based RTK surveying was estimated to require over 40 months and 400+ surveyors. With budget constraints and a political mandate to complete within 24 months, the project team needed a fundamentally different approach.

After extensive field trials against three competing platforms, the program selected Oscar Trek™ visual RTK receivers as the primary field hardware. Three features drove the decision:

• Visual surveying — surveyors could capture boundary points from the camera image without physically placing a pole at inaccessible or dangerous locations (riverbanks, walls, traffic lanes, dense undergrowth).
• Calibration-free tilt — no time lost to pole leveling on uneven cadastral terrain; tilt compensation remained accurate to 60°.
• TAP™ PPP as fallback — in states with sparse CORS coverage, Oscar Trek™ fell back to satellite-based PPP correction, maintaining 2-4 cm accuracy without setting up local base stations.

Tersus partnered with a local distribution partner in Lagos to handle logistics, training, and service. Over an eight-week training program, 185 surveyors were certified on the Oscar Trek™ and Emlid Flow-compatible workflows, with ongoing remote support from Tersus's regional engineering team.

Eighteen months into the program, the field teams had verified 2.3 million parcels across all 36 Nigerian states — running more than 40% ahead of the original timeline projection. Surveyor productivity averaged 3-5× higher than traditional pole-based workflows, driven primarily by the visual non-contact measurement capability and elimination of base station setup time.

The Ministry of Lands reported an 85% reduction in rework attributed to the AR stakeout preview, which allowed surveyors to verify boundary placement before committing data to the official registry. For the first time in national history, Nigeria is on track to deliver a fully digitized land registry across all states within a single administration.