Reverse lookup · coordinates to legal land
GPS to Legal Land Description
Enter a latitude and longitude and get the legal land description containing that point — the section, quarter or LSD in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and BC's Peace Country, or the NTS/BCGS location elsewhere in British Columbia. Computed against surveyed township corners, not an idealized grid.
Worked example: 53.476038, -113.405612
A reverse lookup walks the survey grid from the outside in — township, then section, then any finer subdivision you ask for:
- Input53.476038, -113.405612Decimal-degree latitude and longitude — a point in southeast Edmonton
- Locate the townshipTownship 52, Range 24, W4The point is matched against surveyed township corners to find the containing township
- Resolve the section12-52-24-W4Within the township, the point falls in section 12 — sections number 1–36 from the southeast corner
- Refine if wantedQuarter · LSDThe same point can be reported as its quarter section (NE/NW/SE/SW) or its ~40-acre legal subdivision (1–16)
The result: 53.476038, -113.405612 sits in section 12-52-24-W4, southeast Edmonton. The map shows the parcel outline around your point so you can see exactly where in the section it falls.
Coordinate format
Enter decimal degrees: latitude first, then longitude, separated by a comma or space. Western Canada is west of Greenwich, so the longitude is negative — 53.476038, -113.405612, not 113.405612. If you have degrees-minutes-seconds from a GPS unit or a document, convert to decimal first (degrees + minutes/60 + seconds/3600). Anywhere from four to six decimal places is plenty; six decimals is roughly 10 cm.
You choose the granularity of the answer: the full section, a quarter (NE/NW/SE/SW), or the 40-acre LSD — whichever matches how the location will be written up. How each level nests is covered in the reverse-lookup guide.
Need the other direction? The DLS/LSD lookup turns a written description back into a parcel map and coordinates, and the Alberta LSD to GPS guide walks through that conversion step by step.
Coverage and the BC fallback
Reverse lookup works across the entire Dominion Land Survey — Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and BC's Peace River Block. For coordinates elsewhere in British Columbia, where no DLS grid exists, the tool falls back to the NTS/BCGS system and returns the well-style location (like d-96-H/94-A-15) containing your point. Points outside Western Canada's surveyed grids — mountains far from either system, the territories, other provinces — return no result rather than a guess. Full details on the coverage page.
Positions come from surveyed corner data for more than 21,000 townships, warped over the ideal grid — accurate to tens of metres for navigation and reference. Not a legal survey: parcel boundaries for legal purposes need a licensed land surveyor.
Standing on the quarter right now?
Current-location lookup is where the iPhone app shines: one tap converts where you're standing into the legal description — computed on-device with offline maps, so it works in a field, on a lease road or anywhere else without a signal.
Get Land Description Lookup for iPhone