Wildlife Telemetry Collars and Monitoring

The USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station intends to issue a indefinite-delivery contract that includes three (3) on year ordering periods to Advanced Telemetry Systems, Inc. for GPS tracking collars for white-tailed deer, wild pigs, and coyotes.

This research requires GPS collars for several age/sex classes of white-tailed deer, vaginal implant transmitters for deer, and GPS collars for wild pigs and coyotes. Collars for all species must be equipped with user-commandable, remote drop-off mechanisms. These drop-offs must further be capable of re-locking to enable re-deploying the collars on the same or different animals. Vaginal implant transmitters (VITs), which signal when a deer has given birth to fawns (thus enabling their capture and collaring), must have both temperature and light sensors to detect when the transmitter has been expelled during birth and must communicate with the mother’s collar to send text and email alerts to the user. Fawn collars must be no larger than 125 g, small enough for a newborn fawn to carry. Further, fawn collars must contain batteries capable of recording GPS fixes every 15 minutes for at least 42 days (6 weeks). All GPS collars (adult and fawn deer, wild pig, and coyote) must have comparable GPS functionality (accuracy, programmability, and types of data collected) to enable comparisons of data among individual animals. Data shall be available on a website for researchers to view, retrieve, and save data in .csv format and Google Earth .kml files.

The anticipated award date is October 10, 2025. Interested parties may identify their interests and capabilities to respond to this requirement to the Contracting Specialist, Shannon Wrobel, by email at shannon.wrobel@usda.gov with a courtesy email to the Contracting Officer, Keith Friot, keith.d.friot@usda.gov no later than 5:00pm EST September 29, 2025. Any response to this notice must show clear and convincing evidence that competition would be advantageous to the Government.

Information received will be considered solely for the purpose of determining whether to conduct a competitive procurement. No reimbursement for any cost connected with providing capability information will be provided.