The next series of published articles are created for Land Surveyors United and should be mandated for everyone involved in the land development industry (public and private) to understand that reliance on free (and non-free) GIS and mapping data, instead of hiring a professional land surveyor, can be a terrible decision - especially at the beginning stages of a development.

To fix these problems we need to teach the stakeholders of growth (i.e. YOU) to understand the problems. And we have to bring the Land Surveying Industry out of the 18th century (as far as the deliverables) and bring them into the 21st Century - thus, working with Land Surveyors United - the leading blog for the surveying industry over the next few months.

The Land Surveying industry is literally dying - the vast majority of surveyors are over 65 and young people are avoiding Land Surveying as a career.

While we are known internationally as a leader, if not the leader, in innovations for the land development design (planning) industry, few know that our planning company was a spin-off from a land surveying software think-tank founded in the mid-1970's. For decades we collaborated with Hewlett Packard, and are still creating new land surveying based innovations to move the surveying industry out of the past and into the future. We were there at the birth of GIS and have the background and technical foundation to recognize problems that are made worse by existing technologies and solutions from the major software developers and take action to eliminate those problems.

When you understand the limitations of the data structures of both GIS and the increasing problems with LiDAR technology, you will have an understanding that technology itself can cause more problems than intended improvements. Without understanding these problems, those involved in the industry (i.e. YOU) will be making bad business decisions that can destroy economic and environmental progress.

As far as those in the land surveying industry - in our opinion which will be explained in this and future educational videos, in order to reverse the downward spiral of the Land Surveying Industry, Land Surveyors must understand that to attract young people into the industry it takes much more than the latest super-cool field tech - the office tech must be as futuristic, and the deliverables today that look almost identical as centuries ago (because of antique drafting standards). More important is that nobody today is impressed with a survey plat that lacks critical information and is difficult to understand. We have the ability today to deliver far more useful and exact information, eliminate the errors caused by CAD and the complexity of CAD based land surveying delivering easy to understand survey plats in both beautifully rendered 2D and interactive 3D. We need to get the industry excited about retaining a land surveyor and make it attractive to the youth. The existing solutions fail miserably to achieve those goals. The majority of Land Surveying business owners (the bulk over 65) need to move forward and demand change or the industry that they spent their lives in is in danger.