Identifying the spatial and temporal scale at which animals select resources is critical for predicting how populations respond to changes in the environment. The spatial distribution of fine-scale resources (e.g. patches of dense vegetation) are often linked with critical life-history requirements such as denning and feeding sites. However, mapping these microhabitat features can be challenging as the acquisition of fine-resolution data using traditional field methods (e.g. plot surveys) is labor-intensive and expensive. The deployment of high-resolution light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors on unoccupied aerial systems (UAS) provides an opportunity to evaluate fine-scale animal–habitat relationships in a way rarely afforded in wildlife ecology studies. In this paper, we collect UAS-based LiDAR to evaluate the microhabitat relationships of snowshoe hares Lepus americanus across a range of forest cover types and seral stages in the temperate-boreal forests of northern New England. We mapped 14 forested stands (each 20 ha) using UAS–LiDAR (> 300 returns m⁻²) and conducted fecal pellet surveys to estimate snowshoe hare microhabitat selection during the leaf-off and leaf-on seasons of 2022. We used the LiDAR point cloud data to generate traditional forest metrics (canopy closure, sapling prevalence, and shrub prevalence) that are often used in snowshoe hare habitat studies and three-dimensional metrics that we hypothesized to represent predator exposure (viewshed and lacunarity) and food availability (lacunarity). We found that snowshoe hares selected microhabitats with higher sapling and shrub prevalence and avoided open areas and viewsheds during the leaf-off period. We also found that hares selected regularly spaced medium-sized gaps during the leaf-on season, potentially highlighting preferences for small open areas that have increased cover and food in the summer. The use of these UAS-based LiDAR metrics provides a new opportunity for understanding and predicting microhabitat selection not only for snowshoe hares but for myriad other wildlife species.