Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks, and Tourism (KDWPT) manages a variety of public lands in the state totaling 150 areas and over 460,000 acres. KDWPT has grown increasingly interested in use of Unmanned Aerial (or Aircraft) Vehicles (UAVs, or most commonly, drones) for assessing, monitoring, and managing natural resources on these public lands. Predictably, recreational users of drones are similarly interested in lands managed by KDWPT as locales to fly their personal vehicles. To assess public sentiment toward UAVs in general and UAV use on lands managed by KDWPT, the agency assembled an agency committee to study the issue, requesting the help of DJ Case & Associates to:

1. Conduct a literature review to establish background and understanding of UAV emergence, use, and future prospects;
2. Conduct a survey of the Kansas general public to assess citizen sentiment toward UAVs in general and use of UAVs on KDWPT lands specifically. The survey draft was developed in large measure by the KDWPT UAV Planning Committee, in collaboration with DJ Case & Associates (DJ Case). DJ Case worked with an industry-leader in online survey research, Toluna, in administering the survey to 800 empaneled adults, 18 years and older, residing in Kansas. DJ Case weighted (or “normalized”) the dataset to reflect age and gender distributions of the adult Kansas population. The dataset was representative of the Kansas adult population, including race-ethnicity and urban-rural residence.