Researchers have developed an automated radio-telemetry system that can tell them, within minutes, when a tagged animal returns to a remote study site — a capability they demonstrated in one of the harshest field settings on Earth. The system, called ALERT (Automatic LoRa-Enabled Radio Tracker), was tested at Atka Bay, Antarctica, from November 2024 to January 2025, where it successfully alerted researchers to the return of all 18 tagged adult emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) equipped during the trial.
The challenge the system addresses is familiar to anyone working with archival biologging tags. These devices record detailed data on animal movement and behaviour, but the data can only be accessed if the tag is physically recovered. Archival tags are therefore typically deployed on animals that show site fidelity or predictable movement patterns, which increases the odds of recapture. To help with recovery, the tags are frequently paired with Very High Frequency (VHF) transmitters that signal the presence of a tagged animal within detection range.
Timing, however, is critical. In the Antarctic trial, the researchers noted that emperor penguins may remain available for recapture for only a few hours before departing on their next foraging trip, so repeated manual surveys are both labour-intensive and prone to missing brief visits.
Existing automated VHF monitoring systems can reduce the need for such surveys, but the team behind ALERT argues that they come with practical drawbacks. Many rely on proprietary hardware and software, provide limited remote data access, or require substantial power and infrastructure. These constraints limit their applicability in remote, dynamic, or extreme environments — precisely the places where biologging studies often take place.
ALERT was designed to overcome those limitations. The system combines custom-built, highly sensitive VHF receiving stations with Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) communication. Each station continuously scans for uncoded VHF signals, detects them using a custom algorithm, and wirelessly transmits detection scores to a central gateway. From there, researchers can view near-real-time visualizations of animal presence, letting them know when a tagged penguin has come back to the colony.
A key design goal was accessibility. The system can be assembled from commercial off-the-shelf components and does not require specialized electrical engineering expertise, which lowers the barrier for research teams that lack in-house electronics capability. In the Antarctic deployment, three receiving stations were placed around the emperor penguin colony to notify researchers whenever tagged birds returned from foraging trips.
Performance under Antarctic conditions was encouraging. Each station reliably detected VHF signals within an effective range of approximately 0.8 kilometres, and the network successfully alerted researchers to the return of every one of the 18 tagged penguins within minutes of their arrival. That rapid notification window gave the team the time it needed to reach the colony and recover the archival data loggers before the birds left again.
The authors describe both the hardware and software architecture of ALERT in their paper and evaluate system performance under the demanding conditions of the Antarctic field site. By documenting the design in detail, they aim to make the approach reproducible for other teams working in locations where conventional communication infrastructure is unavailable.
Beyond the specific penguin deployment, the researchers position ALERT as an easily deployable and scalable solution for automated VHF telemetry in remote and logistically challenging environments. Because the stations are built from commercially available parts and communicate over LoRaWAN, the system could in principle be adapted to other species and sites where animals return briefly to predictable locations and manual monitoring is impractical.
The study, published open access in the journal Animal Biotelemetry, adds to a growing body of work on automated wildlife monitoring.
Subject of Research: An automated LoRaWAN-connected VHF radio-telemetry system for detecting returning tagged wildlife in remote environments, tested on emperor penguins in Antarctica.
Article Title: The automatic LoRa-enabled radio tracker for wildlife monitoring in remote environments
Article References: Baille, L. M. R., Houstin, A., Weaver, K., Winterl, A., Bardon, G., Le Bohec, C., & Zitterbart, D. P. (2026). The automatic LoRa-enabled radio tracker for wildlife monitoring in remote environments. Animal Biotelemetry. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40317-026-00490-0
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1186/s40317-026-00490-0
Keywords: biologging, VHF telemetry, LoRaWAN, emperor penguins, Antarctica, wildlife monitoring, archival tags, automated radio telemetry, tag recovery, remote sensing, animal tracking, Animal Biotelemetry
News Source: Margaret Porter. (October 30, 2026). Automated VHF tracker alerts researchers to returning penguins within minutes. Scienmag.
