Boundary and topographic survey, slope, drainage and LiDAR terrain, measured before civil design instead of estimated from imagery.
On a ground-mount or utility-scale project, terrain is not background detail. Slope drives pile depth and tracker row geometry. Drainage drives earthwork. A boundary that turns out to sit four feet from where the design assumed drives a redesign. These are the line items that move after financial close, and they move because the ground was estimated.
Refusal depth and row geometry come off real elevation. Imagery-derived terrain carries error that shows up as change orders during piling.
Where water goes decides how much dirt moves. Earthwork is one of the largest swing items on a ground-mount budget.
Setbacks are measured from a legal boundary, not an approximate one. Easements and encroachments located late are a redesign, not a note.
Land surveying sits at the front of a ground-mount or utility-scale project, before civil design. It pairs with the construction monitoring and inspection work described on the utility-scale page, so the same site is measured before the build, during it, and after energisation against one standard.
For rooftop work the equivalent front-end capture is the site survey.