**Acknowledgements**

The author would like to acknowledge the Ministry of Works, Belize C.A for providing the LiDAR datasets and the aerial photographs for the study area.

*Spatial Variability in Environmental Science - Patterns, Processes, and Analyses*

for proper analysis of the extent of the damages suffered. The images of tiny houses are provided in **Figure 17**, which gives an illustration of the size of some of the buildings in the study area. What is not shown are tiny buildings that are poorly constructed and in a very dilapidated condition, which may house sometimes a

During field collection and verification, it was observed that some of these small buildings were not classified in the LiDAR data. This means that their roof outline cannot be extracted. However, with OBIA process using a combination of aerial photos and Lidar height information, these small structures were successfully extracted as well. The image on the left in **Figure 18** shows small building that were not classified, with red points representing buildings. The image on the right is the result of the OBIA building extraction, which clearly shows that it has extracted

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**Figure 17.**

*Example of tiny buildings not classified as buildings in LiDAR.*

family of 4 or 5 people.

*Building footprint outlines overlaid on aerial photos.*

**Figure 16.**

My employer, the Ministry of Natural Resources, Belize C.A for granting me study leave to conduct this research. The Education Abroad Program at Vancouver Island University, for choosing me as a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Scholarship. Lastly, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my research advisor Dr. Michael Govorov. Thank you for your guidance and support throughout this project.
