The Role of Surveying in the Proper Execution of the Investment Process

Surveying, like construction, has been part of society since ancient times, serving as a practical application of geometry in the field. It is surveyors, land surveyors, and geomatics specialists who ensure the correct location (georeferencing) and orientation of construction project axes, along with their proper relationship to existing or future infrastructure. It is thanks to them that analyses and designs can be carried out on up-to-date map bases, taking into account the property rights of the areas being analyzed. It is specialists in the field of surveying who enable an effective construction process that complies with specified tolerances, regardless of the scale of the project.
Any structural or ground deformations that alter their geometry during construction also fall within these specialists’ purview. And once construction is complete, they are the ones who conduct the as-built survey to verify compliance with the design specifications and the building permit. Surveyors are the first on-site, even before construction begins, and the last to leave after conducting final inspections. They also monitor the condition of structures during their operation, examining deformations caused by natural factors (e.g., landslides) and anthropogenic factors (e.g., mining operations). As the current manager of Poland’s largest geodata databases describing geospatial relationships and attributes (also made available through geoportals), the surveyor is an indispensable specialist in every project, ensuring through their expertise the reliability of the measurements and analyses on which a range of other services—not just construction-related ones—rely.

Faculty member at the Stanisław Staszic University of Science and Technology – Department of Mining Surveying and Environmental Engineering, Chair of Mining Area Protection, Geoinformatics, and Mining Surveying. Specialist in mining geodesy and the study of deformations in engineering structures and terrain surfaces under the influence of natural and anthropogenic processes. His specific areas of interest include the study of slender structures (chimneys, shaft towers, mine shafts), large-scale structures (earth dams, mining areas), as well as underground structures such as transportation tunnels and underground excavations, including those from both modern and historical mining operations. For a number of years, he has been implementing and testing modern measurement methods based, among other things, on laser scanning—including mobile scanning—which enables the inventory and mapping of structures inaccessible by conventional methods. Together with the department’s team, he is involved in precise measurements of tunnel control networks based on gyroscopic measurements. He collaborates with specialists in the fields of civil engineering, mining, geotechnics, microgravimetry, and mechanics in the geometric assessment of the phenomena under study.