It permits to know the habitat situation of for example birds, knowing the forests characteristics, another valuable information.
A very important thing is that by satellite you can obtain information of large areas or remote lands.
"Woodpeckers are very sensitive to forest characteristics, and so they're very selective about where they decide to live."
Team-member Patrick Adam told BBC News: "We try to measure the diameter of the trees and their density. We can't do that directly from these instruments, but to get at diameter we can measure the height of the trees because tall trees are fatter than short trees; and we get at the density of the forest by looking at the relative amount of light that is returned from the foliage versus that which is returned from the ground.
"So by looking at the areas that have the tallest trees, we know that they also have the largest trees in diameter, and that there's a better chance of there being woodpeckers there. We don't just hypothesise that, we go out and we actually conduct ground-based woodpecker surveys in these locations as well to verify it."
"If we are able to predict where woodpeckers are just based on satellite data then we can also surmise, based on some other vegetation characteristics, that we might also have higher diversity of forest songbirds or even some mammals and reptiles. That's useful in land management planning and biodiversity planning," said Mr Adam.
"It's a lot easier to use satellite data. It's important to still do some ground-truthing at a few select points just to make sure we're not totally going off tangent from reality. But in general, yes, we can cover large areas with the airborne lidar, and we're really hopeful with what we can use the space-borne lidar for because that has global coverage, so we could use that at a much larger scale."
