The urgency of the safety of the components of the natural environment of Central Kazakhstan is due, firstly, to the long development of solid minerals and, in connection with this, the huge expenditure of energy and water resources, and secondly, to the use of obsolete mining technologies. The complex of works on the extraction of solid minerals leads to a change in the entire range of environmental conditions in the mining areas and adjacent areas, which is due to the interconnectedness of all natural components among themselves. The article deals with the processes, associated with work in the mining industry, the beginning of which was laid in the first half of the ХХ century. A prolonged mechanical intervention in the surface, subsurface structures of the earth‘s crust led to the development of a number of dangerous geodynamic processes, that directly and indirectly degrade the ecological state of the surrounding area.

The first stage of any construction is carrying out excavation works. These works are high-priced and timeconsuming. Mostly, for geodetic control of the works, the surveyors are using total stations and GNSS equipment. Last decade, UAV technology was a breakthrough in the geodetic technologies market. One of the possible applications of UAV is the monitoring of excavation works. In the article, the opportunities and accuracy of UAV data while performing the excavation works were studied. The surveying of earth volume in the middle of construction works was made using DJI Phantom 4 UAV. The data were being processed using two photogrammetric software: Agisoft Metashape and PhotoModeler Premium. For comparison, the surveying also was made using a conventional total station. For each data source, the 3D models were generated. The obtained models were compared with each other in CloudCompare software. The comparison revealed the high accuracy of UAV data that satisfies customer’s requirements. For the case of two software comparing, it is better to process data using PhotoModeler. The PhotoModeler software allows performing in-depth data analysis and blunders searching.