Building Footprints Across Belize for Population and Damage Assessment

OpenStreetMap data provides building footprints across Belize, tagged for residential, hospital, school, and place-of-worship uses. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) exports this data via HDX, last updated on 2026-06-26. Coverage reflects volunteer mapper activity, with urban areas typically well-represented and remote areas potentially sparse.

Use Cases

• Estimate population distribution based on building density and type.
• Assess building damage after natural disasters using footprint data.
• Plan urban infrastructure and services based on the location of schools and hospitals.
• Analyze land use patterns from the distribution of residential and commercial buildings.

Strengths

• Includes all OpenStreetMap features tagged with `building=*`, capturing diverse building types.
• Data is available in multiple geospatial formats (GEOPACKAGE, SHP, JSON).
• Explicitly licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL-1.0).

Limitations

• Coverage is uneven, with urban areas well-represented and remote areas likely sparse.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

OpenStreetMap, a free, collaborative world map.

Collection Method

Volunteer geographic information (VGI) collected by mappers.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-26 03:27:19.000718; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Belize