AHP and GIS based Land Suitability Analysis for Built up in Bharatpur Metropolitan City, Nepal

In Bharatpur Metropolitan City (BMC), rapid changes in socioeconomic conditions led to rapid urban growth, which in turn caused a number of environmental damages, including land fragmentation, unauthorized settlements, unchecked land use conversion, rising environmental pollution, and anthropogenicdisasters. The rate of migration has been dramatically rising recently. These forecasts illustrated the gradual migration of people from rural to urban locations. Arable land fragmentation and erratic land use shifts are greatly impacted by rapid urbanization. They are significant concerns for property developers and urban planners. Urban planners and developers are unable to foresee city growth and modeling in the future using accurate management techniques due to unpredictable urban expansion. GIS based multi criteria decision making (MCDM) for land suitability analysis. Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is a combination of qualitative and quantitative method used to calculate the weights of multi criterion by using pairwise matrices. By this method the biophysical and socioeconomic factors underlying the expansion has identified. Suitability maps had been prepared for several classes: highly suitable, moderate suitable, less suitable and restricted area and its percentage of area