In the immediate aftermath of the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti on 2010 January 12, taking the lives of more than 200,000 people and displacing more than one million others from their homes, one of the most vital emergency-response tasks was to quickly and efficiently assess the conditions of tens of thousands of damaged buildings to determine which could still be safely occupied.

As the disaster unfolded and assessments were underway, it became evident that there also was a need for assistance in high-resolution imaging, light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data, and maps for a variety of other rescue and reconstruction tasks (e.g., debris quantification, hydrological mapping, and fault line assessment.)

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