2026-09-03 –, Room3
This talk traces my path from an undergraduate Geomatics Engineering student to an open-mapping leader who applies OpenStreetMap (OSM) data to real engineering problems in Nepal. Since 2023, OSM has served as working engineering data across projects spanning flood hazard modelling, disaster-preparedness mapping, public health, and urban planning — including a flood susceptibility study of the Sunkoshi River Basin where OSM-derived hydrography, combined with AHP-weighted terrain, rainfall, and land-cover data, showed that community-mapped rivers can substitute for missing authoritative datasets in mountainous terrain. Alongside this technical practice, I founded KU YouthMappers to open geospatial work to students across faculties and put women into leadership, lifting female participation in flagship mapping activities to 62% and earning recognition from the Annapurna Post. This talk presents both threads together open data used for real engineering solutions, and the community that makes that work sustainable as a model for women-led open-mapping practice.
My journey began in February 2023 with a first OpenStreetMap workshop and mapathon at Kathmandu University. What started as curiosity about a tool used worldwide turned into sustained practice: within months I placed first in institutional mapping competitions, and by 2024 was training peers, organizing events for the Geomatics Engineering Society, and being recognized internationally through OSM community meetups. That early growth is what led me to see OSM not just as a skill to build, but as infrastructure to share.
Over time, OSM became a recurring input in my actual engineering work rather than a standalone activity. In a flood susceptibility study of the Sunkoshi River Basin, I processed OSM river and stream geometry into two hydrological indicators drainage density and distance-from-river and combined them with terrain, rainfall, vegetation, land-cover, and soil data in a GIS-based Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis framework, weighting each factor with the Analytic Hierarchy Process and testing the results through sensitivity analysis. The outcome showed that OSM's community-mapped rivers can stand in for missing or outdated official hydrographic data in mountainous, data-scarce regions. This was one example among several: a HEC-RAS/ArcGIS flood risk assessment of the Rapti River identified high-risk zones for land-use planning; remote digitization work with NAXA supported a heat-related health risk study; a month-long mapping sprint with the Youth Innovation Lab contributed to disaster-preparedness planning in two rural municipalities; and an interactive heritage map of Bhaktapur supported sustainable tourism. Across all of these, the same underlying practice contributing to and drawing on open geospatial data kept proving useful for different kinds of engineering and planning problems.
I want the audience to leave with a concrete sense that open data like OSM is genuinely reusable across engineering problems, and a replicable pathway participate, contribute, lead, institutionalize for growing women-led open-mapping communities elsewhere.
The primary open-source project essential to this work is OpenStreetMap (OSM), which provided the river and stream network data used to derive drainage density and distance-from-river layers for flood susceptibility modeling. These OSM-derived hydrographic datasets were fundamental to the spatial analysis and sensitivity evaluation presented in this study
I make my conference contribution available under the CC BY 4.0 license. The conference contribution comprises the abstract, the text contribution for the conference proceedings, the presentation materials as well as the video recording and live transmission of the presentation:
Prativa Thapa, a final-year Geomatics Engineering student at Kathmandu University, is the President of KU YouthMappers and the Sole Lead Mapping Week under the Geomatics Engineering Society (GES), recognized by Annapurna Express newspaper for her impactful leadership. She also serves as the Country Lead of Women Mapping Asia representing Nepal and is an active member of OSGeo Nepal. Through these roles, she stands as a powerful example of women excelling in the geospatial field, with a deep commitment to using open-source tools in her daily work to promote inclusive, community-driven innovation.