After weeks of planning the helicopter finally came. Since we have been cooperating with Stereocarto‘s San Jose office for quite some time, we were finally able to lure their helicopter down to Samara. Taking off from Liberia it flew about an hour back and forth across Samara and the adjacent beaches. Processing this data will take weeks (if not months) to complete and analyzing it even longer. One of the first applications will be the usual extraction of the bare earth terrain topography followed by the detection of large changes in comparison to our 2012 data. Such changes might be the result of permitted construction or earthworks, but are often illegal remodeling or removal of mountains to “create” building lots or filling in wetland areas with dirt and debris to “gain” land. Finding and quantifying such environmental damages and reporting about the process will be the first primary objective of this project.