fig congress 2018 - Towards UAV-based land tenure data acquisition in Rwanda: Needs assessment and technology response
Claudia Stöcker, Mila Koeva, Serene Ho, Rohan Bennett, Placide Nkerabigwi, Cornelia Schmidt, Jaap Zevenbergen
As a response to the urgent need to record the millions of unregistered land parcels, governments and the international development community seek to design appropriate policies and leverage innovative technologies. Amongst others, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are emerging as a tool for alternative land tenure data acquisition. The advent of low cost, reliable and lightweight UAVs have created new opportunities for collecting timely, tailored and high-quality geospatial information. Even though UAVs appear a promising technology, it is not clear to what extent they meet the needs of communities and governments in the land sector. Furthermore, major bottlenecks are evident: cumbersome regulatory frameworks and undeveloped ground truthing strategies, amongst others, are issues currently impeding scaled application. Thus, the question remains whether the application of UAVs can meet contemporary land administration requirements in developing countries. This question creates the motivation of this paper and is considered in the context of Rwanda. A multi-disciplinary approach is employed. A comprehensive needs assessment with various stakeholders across different levels in Rwanda is undertaken. The outcomes of the needs assessment, as well as a number of UAV test flight missions, provide the profound pre-requisites for the design of UAV workflows. This study sheds light on the needs assessment and design process of UAV-based data acquisition workflows and reveals results of data collection activities and initial UAV test flights in Rwanda. Insights into operational challenges and data quality measures are presented. The paper concludes that the tool of UAV-based data collection seems to offer an answer to the majority of the expressed needs which were assessed with the NGT method. However, the realization of the test flights also reveals three specific challenges that have to be addressed before UAVs can be used for large scale mapping in Rwanda.
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