I recently wrote in my blog welcome message about a book project on the use of mapping technology in 9/11 rescue & recovery efforts. I’m moving this off the welcome message because I am going to start to write it. There are a lot of great resources on the mapping efforts at Pier 92 in New York City available at the GISMO website:
Yahoo! Groups : gismonyc Links
Directions Magazine has a great map gallery at their site:
Directions Magazine: Map Gallery of GIS Community Response to 9/11
Even National Geographics Magazine picked up the story, interviewing some of the members of GISMO:
We just got back from Costa Rica late Sunday night. We left New York on a snowy March 18th and were briefly delayed to de-ice the wings. Four hours later we were in San Jose, met our San Jose guide, who gave us a brief tour orientation while being driven to and dropped at the hotel. After an easy four and a half hour flight, we weren’t too tired, but there wasn’t much to do at the first hotel. We simply hung out in the back yard, overlooking coffee fields with San Jose in the distance, excited about our upcoming week and a half of adventure. 
Our first stop was the La Paz Waterfall Gardens and was our first taste of the local bird-life, plant-life, butterfly-life and food. La Paz is just a couple years old and has trails that go past five waterfalls. It also has an enclosed butterfly garden (boasted as the world’s largest) and an unenclosed hummingbird garden. It was raining, of course. It is a rainforest after all. We hiked up and down trails that at points had metal staircases hung from the side of the ravines. We saw so many different kinds of birds, it is hard to name them all, and were happy at the end to sample the food at the buffet-style cafeteria.
Our next two nights were in Sarapiqui. The La Quinta of Sarapiqui hotel was in a jungle area tucked between pineapple farms. The property was small, but had a few trails around a frog garden, butterfly aviary, fruit garden and a couple of fish ponds. We saw lots of tiny “blue jean” frogs: little strawberry, poison-dart frogs only as big as your thumbnail. We did some fishing but the fish were too smart to get caught. 
The following day, we toured La Selva Biological Station, which is an international research station. Sloths were too shy to appear but we saw just about everything else you could hope to see: coati, bats, lizards, howlers, capuchins, tiger rat snakes, pit vipers, peccaries, poisonous caterpillars, all sorts of birds. We also went on a river raft tour on the last day and saw a lot more creatures and stopped for a snack at a 90-year old farmer’s home near a fork in the river.
Next day, on to Arenal Volcano. We saw shiny, smokey black stuff sliding down the volcano on our first day there, but no fire-show. We stayed at a hotel called Montana de Fuego at the base of the volcano, but the mountain was covered with fog for the rest of the trip. We visited a really nice, secluded hot springs & had some of our better meals there. I have to say I was a bit nervous staying so close to an active volcano and was glad when it was time to leave!
We had some excitement on the drive out to the Pacific coast. Josie was bitten by a capuchin monkey at the jaguar rehab center. The facility houses animals that were taken from illegal traders and that were injured in the wild. The capuchin was formerly kept as a domestic pet under rather cruel conditions. Josie is healing well. Emergency services are pretty good in CR, when you can find them.