Cover: Predicting habitat quality for Great Tits (Parus major) with airborne laser scanning data

1. Overview Habitat quality is a fundamental concept in ecology that is difficult to quantify objectively. In avian ecology, habitat quality is often inferred from demographic rates (Riddington and Gosler 1995), patterns of territory occupancy and stability (Matthysen 1990), or measurements of resource availability (Seki and Takano 1998). Vegetation structure is an important component of bird habitat quality (Fuller and Henderson 1992, Beier and Drennan 1997). For woodland birds, mapping the three-dimensional complexity of their habitat by field survey can be a timeconsuming and difficult task. Airborne laser scanning (ALS) is a remote sensing technique, operating on a principle of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) that supplies fine-grained information on vegetation structure at a woodland scale (Næsset 2002). The cover image (and figure 1) shows a predictive map of reproductive performance in Great Tits (Parus major) based on a woodland canopy height model derived from ALS data. Since Great Tits feed their young on treedwelling lepidopteran larvae, canopy structure influences habitat quality via effects on both food abundance and its availability to the birds. Such remote quantification of habitat quality could greatly enhance our ability to predict impacts of changing environmental pressures on biodiversity.