Using Remote Sensing and Geospatial Technologies for Establishing and Improving Land Governance
Kumar Navulur & Taner Kodanaz
Remote sensing and geospatial technologies have reached the critical mass to start addressing, establishing, and improving Land governance. These technologies coupled with advances in cloud computing, high performance computing, mobile technologies, GPS, and others can provide innovative ways to addressing land governance including creating and maintaining land register systems. The technologies can address land governance issues for urban as well as rural areas, agriculture as well as pasture and forested lands. With maps covering entire countries and the ability to refresh the areas on a periodic basis, these geospatial technologies provide a new and innovative ways to address land governance issues and provide fast and economical alternatives to current methodologies. Land governance includes mapping parcel boundaries as well as recording land ownership of various land parcels within a country. Traditional techniques such as surveying, while accurate, require tremendous amount of resources and time, to create a land governance framework. Maps derived from satellite imagery at sub meter resolution, and with good enough, accuracies provide a unique option to document the land parcels more effectively. Further, technologies such as mobile platforms enable to disseminate this data effectively in the field, to create a land registry system based on observed features from imagery. Further, the maps derived from imagery allow for easy updating and maintenance of land governance systems by leveraging the frequent updates of the maps. As societies across the globe embrace the Location-Context-Timee paradigm, geospatial technologies offer new and innovative options for land governance.
Event: Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty 2015
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