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

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

Application of ERTS-1 data to integrated state planning in the state of Maryland

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Development of a High-Resolution Land Cover Dataset to Support Integrated Water Resources Planning and Management in Northern Utah

Integrated planning and management approaches, including bioregional planning and integrated water resources planning, are comprehensive strategies that strive to balance the sustainability of natural resources and the integrity of ecosystem processes with human development and activities. Implementation of integrated plans and programs remains complicated. However, geospatial technologies, such as geographic information systems and remote sensing, can significantly enhance planning and management processes. Through a United States Environmental Protection Agency Region 8 Wetland Program Development Grant, a high-resolution land cover dataset, with a primary emphasis on mapping and quantifying impervious surfaces, was developed for three watershed sub-basins in northern Utah - Lower Bear-Malad, Lower Weber, and Jordan - to support integrated water resources planning and management. This high-resolution land cover dataset can serve as an indicator of cumulative stress from urbanization; it can support the development of ecologically relevant metrics that can be integrated into watershed health and wetland condition assessments; it can provide general assessments of watershed condition; and it can support the identification of sites in need of restoration and protection

GIS Application to Support Land Administration Services in Ghana: Institutional Factors and Software Developments

In June 1999, the Ghanaian Government launched a new land policy document that sought to address some fundamental problems associated with land administration and management in the country. The document identified the weak land administration system as a particular problem and recommended the introduction of computer-aided information systems in the ‘lands sector’. In 2001, the Government made further proposals to prepare and implement a Land Administration Programme (LAP) to provide a better platform for evolving an efficient land administration that would translate the ‘National Land Policy’ into action. Thus, an up-to-date land information system (LIS), supporting efficient management of land records, is to be constructed, which provides a context for the research reported in this paper. We document two aspects of our research on the adoption of GIS by the Lands Commission Secretariat (LCS) which form part of a pilot project in GIS diffusion. Part one of the paper mainly outlines the empirical results arising from fieldwork undertaken during 2001 to determine the information and GIS requirements of the LCS in relation to their routine administrative processes and to identify the critical factors that are required to ensure that any new GIS applications are successfully embraced. Part two explains the prototype software system developed using ArcView 3.2 and Access that provides the LCS with a means to automate some of the routine administrative tasks that they are required to fulfil. The software has been modified and upgraded following an initial evaluation by LCS employees also conducted as part of the fieldwork in Accra

Why are events important and how to compute them in geospatial research?

Geospatial research has long centered around objects. While attention to events is growing rapidly, events remain objectified in spatial databases. This paper aims to highlight the importance of events in scientific inquiries and overview general event-based approaches to data modeling and computing. As machine learning algorithms and big data become popular in geospatial research, many studies appear to be the products of convenience with readily adaptable data and codes rather than curiosity. By asking why events are important and how to compute events in geospatial research, the author intends to provoke thinking into the rationale and conceptual basis of event-based modeling and to emphasize the epistemological role of events in geospatial information science. Events are essential to understanding the world and communicating the understanding, events provide points of entry for knowledge inquiries and the inquiry processes, and events mediate objects and scaffold causality. We compute events to improve understanding, but event computing and computability depend on event representation. The paper briefly reviews event-based data models in spatial databases and methods to compute events for site understanding and prediction, for spatial impact assessment, and for discovering events\u27 dynamic structures. Concluding remarks summarize key arguments and comment on opportunities to extend event computability

Memos and Mega Projects: Applying Planners’ Perceptions of Their Software to a Framework for the Future of Planning

Software powers the modern urban planning department. However, the majority of academic attention on software in the planning profession has focused on highly specialized land use models, ignoring the importance of common applications that most planners rely upon throughout their workdays. For example, email’s impact on planning has gone largely undiscussed in the literature despite its role as one of the most commonly used software by planners. This report has a twofold purpose: 1) create a protocol for interviewing planners about the software they use routinely; 2) synthesize needs and expectations of planners gathered during interviews with relevant literature on planning technologies into a framework for the future of planning software. The framework presented in this report unifies, for the first time, disparate fields of research on software related to urban planning into a single set of guidelines for developing the future of software for public agencies. This framework provides a research agenda for urban planning software systems that mutually strengthen one another, and a valuable conceptual overview of the diverse information systems involved in the planning profession. Eleven interviews were conducted with mid- and senior-level planners in local governments across Santa Clara County, better known around the world as Silicon Valley. Santa Clara County was selected as the study area for two reasons: well-resourced governments in the area can invest in modern planning software, and to question if the stereotype of the area’s technological leadership extends to its local governments. Senior-level planners were interviewed in a semi-structured format with the interview adjusted based on a short survey about the software most used in the individual’s professional role. Key findings from the interviews informing the framework include: Planners in local governments in Silicon Valley are transitioning into modern software tools, like electronic plan review and permit management systems. There is no special technological advantage in Silicon Valley among public agencies. Planners were eager to fully implement and adopt software features available to them, particularly features that would improve communication about project status with applicants; Planners were unafraid of software automation. Limited automation features available in electronic plan review systems were yet to be fully implemented, and planners embraced the time-saving potential; The volume of email burdened interviewees. This draws attention to the significance of generalized productivity software in the practice of planning; Planners had no immediate need for “big data,” despite the recognized importance of big data in the urban planning technology literature. Perceptions from planners about the software that they use informed key problems and set goals for the framework developed here. Extensive research into emerging software targeting the construction and engineering trades with relevance to planners, as well as software designed to assist creative knowledge workers, informed the development of the future framework for planning software. Features of the framework include: A planning data model that underpins land use codes, development guidelines, and planning department procedures, providing machine-readable logic that underpins rulebased systems in email, project tracking, permit management, electronic plan review, and staff reports; Template-based and data type-aware word processing that encodes standardized practices for writing documents and requires numeric data be stored and represented as such. Electronic plan review systems that assist in checking both objective zoning codes and subjective design guidelines using generalized adaptable rule language; Integrated BIM-GIS supporting both the plan review and permit management process by organizing and visualizing spatial and physical data about the built environment; and Predictable, structured times to respond to email from applicants and the public and process-integrated calendars that recover time for focusing on long-term planning efforts; The generalized productivity software that planners have been using for over thirty years is inadequate for the predicted era of big data generated by networked urban environments. Excel is not designed to support real-time analytics, Word is not designed to assist in describing or associating analytics with textual information, and no application has yet been designed to visualize or organize such data for engaging the public. This framework gives planners and researchers of planning technology insight into the range of software used by planners and develop an innovative class of software fit for stewarding the cities of the coming century