Mapping Building Heights with Lidar and Mapbox

For a project I am conducting at the University of Calgary, I require a value for average square footage of dwellings in Calgary communities. LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is a remote sensing technique utilizating laser readings to obtain the elevation of surface points. From this data, I could obtain a representation of building features. The height of a building can be calculated based on an average of the elevation readings within a building footprint and an average elevation from a buffer around the footprint representing the ground elevation. A summary of the method is outlined at this link. The necessary data were not available for the City of Calgary and another method was employed for the project. None the less, I wanted to experiment with the method. Data were available for the nearby City of Airdrie. Mapbox was used to create the visualization, in conjunction with postGIS and QGIS (open-source is the best).