Did vegetation grow?”Shortly after the fires were contained in late January 2025, ALERTCalifornia sponsored new lidar flights over the Eaton and Palisades burn areas. NV5, an inspection and engineering firm, conducted the scans, and the US Geological Survey is now hosting the public data sets. You have debris flows, mud flows, landslides.”Lidar’s usefulness for quantifying the costs of climate disasters underscores its value in preparing for future fires, floods, and earthquakes. But as policymakers weigh steep budget cuts to scientific research, these crucial lidar data collection projects could face an uncertain future. Jon Keegan writes about technology and AI, and he publishes Beautiful Public Data (beautifulpublicdata.com), a curated collection of government data sets.