Review of remote sensing for land administration: Origins, debates, and selected cases

Conventionally, land administration—incorporating cadastres and land registration—uses ground-based survey methods. This approach can be traced over millennia. The application of photogrammetry and remote sensing is understood to be far more contemporary, only commencing deeper into the 20th century. This paper seeks to counter this view, contending that these methods are far from recent additions to land administration: successful application dates back much earlier, often complementing ground-based methods. Using now more accessible historical works, made available through archive digitisation, this paper presents an enriched and more complete synthesis of the developments of photogrammetric methods and remote sensing applied to the domain of land administration. Developments from early phototopography and aerial surveys, through to analytical photogrammetric methods, the emergence of satellite remote sensing, digital cameras, and latterly lidar surveys, UAVs, and feature extraction are covered. The synthesis illustrates how debates over the benefits of the technique are hardly new. Neither are well-meaning, although oft-flawed, comparative analyses on criteria relating to time, cost, coverage, and quality. Apart from providing this more holistic view and a timely reminder of previous work, this paper brings contemporary practical value in further demonstrating to land administration practitioners that remote sensing for data capture, and subsequent map production, are an entirely legitimate, if not essential, part of the domain. Contemporary arguments that the tools and approaches do not bring adequate accuracy for land administration purposes are easily countered by the weight of evidence. Indeed, these arguments may be considered to undermine the pragmatism inherent to the surveying discipline, traditionally an essential characteristic of the profession. That said, it is left to land administration practitioners to determine the relevance of these methods for any specific country context. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Innovative Remote Sensing Methodologies for Kenyan Land Tenure Mapping

There exists a demand for effective land administration systems that can support the protection of unrecorded land rights, thereby assisting to reduce poverty and support national development-in alignment with target 1.4 of UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It is estimated that only 30% of the world's population has documented land rights recorded within a formal land administration system. In response, we developed, adapted, applied, and tested innovative remote sensing methodologies to support land rights mapping, including (1) a unique ontological analysis approach using smart sketch maps (SmartSkeMa); (2) unmanned aerial vehicle application (UAV); and (3) automatic boundary extraction (ABE) techniques, based on the acquired UAV images. To assess the applicability of the remote sensing methodologies several aspects were studied: (1) user needs, (2) the proposed methodologies responses to those needs, and (3) examine broader governance implications related to scaling the suggested approaches. The case location of Kajiado, Kenya is selected. A combination of quantitative and qualitative results resulted from fieldwork and workshops, taking into account both social and technical aspects. The results show that SmartSkeMa was potentially a versatile and community-responsive land data acquisition tool requiring little expertise to be used, UAVs were identified as having a high potential for creating up-to-date base maps able to support the current land administration system, and automatic boundary extraction is an effective method to demarcate physical and visible boundaries compared to traditional methodologies and manual delineation for land tenure mapping activities.The politics and administration of institutional chang

Innovative Remote Sensing Methodologies for Kenyan Land Tenure Mapping

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Remote Sensing for Land Administration 2.0

The reprint “Land Administration 2.0” is an extension of the previous reprint “Remote Sensing for Land Administration”, another Special Issue in Remote Sensing. This reprint unpacks the responsible use and integration of emerging remote sensing techniques into the domain of land administration, including land registration, cadastre, land use planning, land valuation, land taxation, and land development. The title was chosen as “Land Administration 2.0” in reference to both this Special Issue being the second volume on the topic “Land Administration” and the next-generation requirements of land administration including demands for 3D, indoor, underground, real-time, high-accuracy, lower-cost, and interoperable land data and information

Analysis about obtaining catastral information with radar images in the Termales path of the Vista Hermosa municipality, Meta

Las imágenes SAR pueden usarse en el reconocimiento de objetivos y coberturas en el terreno para generar información física tanto de los predios individuales como de las zonas rurales en su conjunto, aspecto en el cual es necesario determinar metodologías y materiales que permitan elevar la eficiencia y el alcance de la labor catastral. En el proyecto se analizó la utilidad de imágenes SAR para la obtención de información catastral rural detectando, por un lado, elementos lineales cuyas características permiten proponerlos como candidatos a ser linderos visibles y, por otro lado, información útil para la elaboración de mapas de las variables de zonas homogéneas físicas (ZHF) rurales. La zona en la que se desarrolló el trabajo es la vereda Termales del municipio de Vista Hermosa en el departamento del Meta, para lo cual se usaron imágenes en bandas X y P y modelos de elevación digital (DEM) a partir de dichas bandas, productos elaborados entre agosto y julio del año 2007. La detección de linderos visibles se trabajó por medio de interpretación visual y de algoritmos de extracción automática de elementos lineales, que produjeron líneas candidatas a las que les fueron aplicadas las evaluaciones de medidas de calidad con respecto a linderos de predios obtenidos por el proyecto Tierra en Paz, que implementó pilotos de la metodología FFP en varios municipios del país desde febrero del año 2018. En lo concerniente a la obtención de información para generación de mapas de variables de ZHF rurales, se trabajó en las variables de áreas homogéneas de tierras en el componente de la pendiente del terreno, siguiendo con uso actual del suelo, influencia de las vías y disponibilidad de aguas superficiales permanentes. Para validar los resultados, se tomó como referencia respectivamente el DEM de la Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), las coberturas de la tierra a escala 1:100000 del período 2005 a 2009 producidas por el Instituto de Hidrología, Meteorología y Estudios Ambientales (IDEAM) y la información producida por el Instituto Geográfico Agustín Codazzi (IGAC) para la cartografía básica a escala 1:25000. En general, el trabajo realizado con la imagen en banda P, arrojó mejores resultados, que el trabajo hecho con la banda X. Sin embargo, la extracción de elementos lineales candidatos a ser linderos visibles requiere un mayor desarrollo dados los bajos niveles de calidad, para lo cual se plantean diferentes materiales de trabajo y ajustes en los parámetros de la metodología aplicada.SAR images can be used in the recognition of targets and land coverages to generate physical information of both individual properties and rural areas as a whole, an aspect in which it is necessary to determine methodologies and materials to increase the efficiency and scope of cadastral work. The project analyzed the usefulness of SAR images for obtaining rural cadastral information, detecting, on the one hand, linear elements whose characteristics make it possible to propose them as candidates to be visible boundaries and, on the other hand, useful information for the elaboration of maps of the variables of rural homogeneous physical zones. The area in which the work was carried out is the Termales district of the Vista Hermosa municipality in the department of Meta, using X and P band images and digital elevation models (DEM) from these bands, products produced between August and July 2007. The detection of visible boundaries was worked by means of visual interpretation and automatic extraction algorithms of linear elements, which produced candidate lines to which the evaluations of quality measures were applied with respect to boundaries of properties obtained by the Tierra en Paz project, which implemented pilots of the FFP methodology in several municipalities of the country since February 2018. Regarding the obtaining of information for the generation of maps of rural ZHF variables, work was done on the variables of homogeneous land areas in the land slope component, following with current land use, influence of roads and availability of permanent surface water. To validate the results, the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) DEM, the 1:100000 scale land covers from 2005 to 2009 produced by the Instituto de Hidrología, Meteorología y Estudios Ambientales (IDEAM) and the information produced by the Instituto Geográfico Agustín Codazzi (IGAC) for the basic cartography at 1:25000 scale were used as references. In general, the work done with the P-band image yielded better results than the work done with the X-band. However, the extraction of linear elements that are candidates to be visible boundaries requires further development given the low quality levels, for which different working materials and adjustments in the parameters of the applied methodology are proposed

Fit-for-Purpose Land Administration- Providing Secure Land Rights at Scale. Volume 2: Country Implementation

This Special Issue provides an insight, collated from 26 articles, focusing on various aspects of the Fit-For-Purpose Land Administration (FFPLA) concept and its application. It presents some influential and innovative trends and recommendations for designing, implementing, maintaining and further developing Fit-For-Purpose solutions for providing secure land rights at scale. The first group of 14 articles is published in Volume One and discusses various conceptual innovations related to spatial, legal and institutional aspects and its wider applications within land use management. The second group of 12 articles is published in Volume Two and focuses on case studies from various countries throughout the world, providing evidence and lessons learned from the FFPLA implementation process