Towards UAV-based Land Tenure Data Acquisition

The realm of land administration is currently being challenged: conventional western-oriented land administration systems have mostly failed to supply their expected results in developing countries. Amongst others, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are evolving as a tool for alternative land tenure data acquisition approaches. However, major bottlenecks such as regulatory frameworks and time-consuming ground truthing are issues currently hindering large-scale implementation. This study sheds light into the design process of UAV-based data acquisition workflows and reveals results of initial field tests in Rwanda and Germany. Insights of operational challenges and data quality measures will be presented. The research is associated with the EU H2020 project “its4land”.