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This paper examines the spatiotemporal pattern of urbanization in Kathmandu Valley using remote sensing and spatial metrics techniques. The study is based on 33-years of time series data compiled from satellite images. Along with new developments within the city fringes and rural villages in the valley, shifts in the natural environment and newly developed socioeconomic strains between residents are emerging. A highly dynamic spatial pattern of urbanization is observed in the valley. Urban built-up areas had a slow trend of growth in the 1960s and 1970s but have grown rapidly since the 1980s. The urbanization process has developed fragmented and heterogeneous land use combinations in the valley. However, the refill type of development process in the city core and immediate fringe areas has shown a decreasing trend in the neighborhood distances between land use patches, and an increasing trend towards physical connectedness, which indicates a higher probability of homogenous landscape development in the upcoming decades.

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This paper presents an integrated technique of analytical hierarchical process (AHP) and geographic information system (GIS) to evaluate the land for peri-urban agriculture. Hanoi province, Vietnam was selected for the case study. Transformation of conventional agriculture to modern cash crops is the current trend in peri-urban Hanoi. A field survey with focused group discussions was conducted. Based on field survey data analysis, soil, land use, water resources, road network and market were chosen as major factors affecting the peri-urban agriculture. A map of each factor with different logical criteria was prepared. The AHP method was applied to identify the priority weight of each factor. Five spatial layers with their corresponding weights were linearly combined to prepare the suitability map. The map was further scaled as high suitable, medium suitable, low suitable and unsuitable land for the peri-urban agriculture. This empirical scenario provides a cost effective, rapid land evaluation framework which may help policy makers, urban and regional planners and researchers working in developing countries. r

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The difficulty of fusion splicing hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber (PBGF) to conventional step index single mode fiber (SMF) has severely limited the implementation of PBGFs. To make PBGFs more functional we have developed a method for splicing a hollow-core PBGF to a SMF using a commercial arc splicer. A repeatable, robust, low-loss splice between the PBGF and SMF is demonstrated. By filling one end of the PBGF spliced to SMF with acetylene gas and performing saturation spectroscopy, we determine that this splice is useful for a PBGF cell.