**6. Conclusions**

The presented work highlights the capabilities of UAS technology to match the needs of land professionals in Rwanda. Results of a sound needs assessment across different stakeholder groups demonstrate prioritised demands of respective respondents. Although ranked differently, the need for high-resolution, up-to-date land information is consistently identified in the final lists of all group discussions. Across the globe, UAS have become an attractive technology and only the upcoming years will show whether multiple governmental and non-governmental stakeholders can capitalise on the numerous benefits of this data acquisition method. The flight missions in Rwanda showed that UAS as a platform to remotely capture images have clear advantages in terms of fit-for-purpose data provision by facilitating accurate, up-to-date data with a potentially high spatial as well as temporal resolution. However, the integration of the needs assessment and the UAS test flights indicates that structural and capacity conditions currently undermine the vast potential of the UAS data acquisition method. Therefore, a key policy priority should be to implement country-specific capacity development and governance strategies; otherwise, scaled implementation and increasing technology uptake might remain wishful thinking. Notwithstanding the outlined challenges, the results of this study show that UAS technology has the potential to be an appropriate land tool with a significant contribution in catering the base data for most of the prioritized land information needs in Rwanda.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, C.S. (Claudia Stöcker), M.K., R.B. and J.Z.; Data curation, C.S. (Claudia Stöcker); Formal analysis, C.S. (Claudia Stöcker) and S.H.; Funding acquisition, R.B.; Investigation, C.S. (Claudia Stöcker), S.H., P.N. and C.S. (Cornelia Schmidt); Project administration, M.K.; Supervision, M.K. and J.Z.; Visualization, C.S. (Claudia Stöcker); Writing–original draft, C.S. (Claudia Stöcker) and S.H.; Writing–review & editing, C.S. (Claudia Stöcker), S.H., P.N., C.S. (Cornelia Schmidt), M.K., R.B. and J.Z.

**Funding:** The research described in this paper was funded by the research project "its4land," which is part of the Horizon 2020 program of the European Union, project number 687828.

**Acknowledgments:** The authors thank Charis UAS Ltd. in Rwanda for the technical realization and support of all UAS test flights for this research investigation.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

## **References**


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