Nevada PLSS Converter — Section Township Range to GPS

Nevada is surveyed under the Mount Diablo Meridian, which it shares with California. The Mount Diablo Meridian's initial point was established in 1851 on the summit of Mount Diablo in present-day Contra Costa County, California. From that initial point, the baseline and meridian lines extend eastward into Nevada, making Mount Diablo one of the most geographically significant initial points in the western PLSS — governing surveys across both California's Central Valley and most of Nevada's vast interior basin and range country.

Nevada is the most federally owned state in the continental United States. The federal government — primarily through the Bureau of Land Management — controls approximately 85% of Nevada's 71 million acres. State land adds another 3%. Private land represents only about 12% of the total, and much of that private land is concentrated in the river valleys and the areas around Las Vegas, Reno, and Carson City. This extraordinary level of federal ownership means that almost every resource extraction, energy project, or land transaction in Nevada involves federal PLSS-described parcels managed by the BLM's Nevada office.

Nevada's land character is shaped by the Basin and Range physiographic province — a series of north-south trending mountain ranges separated by broad, flat desert valleys. This terrain created a distinctive survey environment: the valleys were easy to survey across, but the ranges themselves posed access challenges. Original GLO survey crews worked in summer heat as extreme as Arizona's, often without reliable water sources, and many mountain townships show the protracted sections and government lots that resulted from incomplete field surveys. Despite these challenges, Nevada is generally well surveyed in comparison to Alaska, with most of its accessible land measured on the ground during the mining and ranching surveys of the late 19th century.