Ecologist Mary Power takes flight. she swoops down on the Angelo Coast Range Reserve in Mendocino County and careens up a narrow canyon, surveying each tree in her study site. She can even see the rocks on the ground, some as small as six inches. Her cockpit? A desk in her laboratory. She pilots through the three-dimensional map watching a pair of enormous computer screens.

The goal of Power's flight is nothing short of predicting the future. Power studies food webs, the network of interactions between animals and the things they eat, and she wants to know how salmon will be impacted if a forest is cut down. She wants to know when the streams will clog with algae and when they'll be barren. Even more, she wants to know how climate change will affect the animals she studies.

Until recently, she and other ecologists were flummoxed by these kinds of questions. All they could do was wait, observe what happened, and then try to figure out why. Combining her knowledge of food webs with new mapping technology, Power now can predict changes across the landscape and test to see if they're right. "That's something I've never tasted before as a food web ecologist," she says.

Power touches a button and all the trees vanish, revealing the bare ground below, complete with boulders and streams. This map is more than just an aerial photograph. It is a three-dimensional re-creation of the landscape, generated with LiDar, which measures distance using the travel time of light. A special plane flew above the reserve bouncing laser beams off the ground to see all the nooks and crannies below. Because the reserve is heavily forested, Power wouldn't be able to get this clear a view of the terrain on the ground, or even in a regular plane.

She flies up the narrowing streambed and points out how, when the pools grow smaller, the steep, rocky riffles in between lengthen. Those are key to one of her first predictive successes, she says: explaining the feeding behavior of bats. Bill Rainey, a member of Power's group, discovered a pattern at low elevations: most bats in the site feed exclusively over pools along streams, flying low to nab insects just as they emerge from the water to fly for the first time. But at higher elevations, the bats feed all across the territory, snatching insects off leaves. Team members wondered why.

"We think the white noise from those riffles jams up the bats' ability to locate the insects with their ultrasound," Power says. With help from Berkeley earth scientist Bill Dietrich, who provided the LiDar imagery, the group will use the aerial maps to estimate impacts of land-use or climate-change-related decreases in river flow on the pools and riffles at places where the bats change their feeding behavior. Those data could predict how bats would eat at different locations. That's important because bats eat huge numbers of mosquitoes, which spread West Nile virus.