Innovative Remote Sensing Methodologies for Kenyan Land Tenure Mapping

Abstract

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.

Remote Sensing for Land Administration

“…Second, Koeva et al [33] introduce a suite remote sensing approaches, developed, adapted, applied, and tested for the case of land tenure recording in Kenya. These include a unique ontological analysis approach using smart sketch maps (SmartSkeMa); UAV application; and automatic boundary extraction techniques, based based on the acquired UAV images.…”

Urban 3d Modelling Methods: A State-of-the-Art Review

“…Regarding the usage of remote sensing data, major data input for all the methods, it can be sensitive sometimes when it comes to a specific study area or a specific time point (e.g., up-to-date data can be very sensitive). For the highresolution data obtained by LiDAR and UAV, it is imperative to identify the local regulations/laws (e.g., a no-fly zone and flight approval time), and cooperation capability among different stakeholders (Koeva et al, 2020;Stöcker et al, 2017). Studies using BIM and voxel-based modelling in subtle scale and based on high-resolution data should pay more attention.…”

Testing and Validating the Suitability of Geospatially Informed Proxies on Land Tenure in North Korea for Korean (Re-)Unification

“…Land administration deals with the people-to-land relationship, by describing, analyzing, designing, and measuring their relations that include social, economic, spatial, legal, and engineering perspectives [11]. Along with the growth of remote sensing applications in SES, there has been growing recognition and evidence of the vital links between remote sensing and land administration [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. Geospatial data has emerged as powerful source of information for enabling both socio-technical assessment [20] and socio-legal analysis [21] in land administration sphere.…”