Solar-based renewable energy adoption is in its early stage in the power system of Nepal complying with its commitment to carbon neutrality. The government of Nepal has declared a goal of setting up solar power plants of at least 200 MW in Madhesh Province, but the selection of optimal sites will be the decisive factor in achieving this goal. Therefore, rigorous investigation is necessary for optimal site selection. A three-step framework combining the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Geographical Information System (GIS) has been adopted to identify the optimal location for solar power plant installation in Madhesh Province. The framework includes the creation of weighted individual raster images for the different criteria, images of restricted areas for solar installation, and a combination of all the rasters into a single raster using GIS-based software. The weights of the criteria and sub-criteria have been evaluated using the AHP model, which is an expert judgments-based model. The criteria considered were solar irradiance, annual mean temperature, distance from the road, distance from the substation, distance from the urban area, elevation, aspect, and land use. The results were graded from the least preferred area to the most highly suitable area. The most highly suitable areas were in the Saptari, Siraha, Dhanusa, and Mahottari districts, while the districts in the western region of the province had less suitable areas. Thus, the province’s eastern region is most suitable for installing solar power plants.
Land cover change is rapidly following path of environmental degradation, imbalance on ecosystem. Kathmandu, Lalitpur and Bhaktapur district has experienced a very high trend of urbanization and land use land cover change. Mapping this trend is absolutely necessary for sustainable development as well as conservation of the ecosystem. While there are desktop applications for making this mapping and analysis possible, upgrading to the web is the best possible way in order to interact with public as well as much easier way of data visualization, data analysis and data dissemination. This paper portrays the design and implementation process along with the visualization of a WebGIS platform via thin client architecture. A dynamic web map portal has been developed concerning the land cover change of Kathmandu, Lalitpur and Bhaktapur district. Among the several Free Open Source server software, OpenGeo Suite has been adopted for the project because it has a robust and flexible design that allows us to reliably handle and publish geospatial data. PostgreSQL/PostGIS, QGIS, Geoserver, Leaflet, and Apache Tomcat has been utilized as the web server in this suite. A fully functional website has been developed in order to host the maps and its components. WMS layers has also been published using Geoserver and styled as can be displayed on the web map portal. Leaflet plugins has been used with the help of which different tools like Zoom, Pan, Full Screen View and Distance Calculator are made available on the portal.
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