U.S. Army seeks bat researchers for Aberdeen Proving Ground

The U.S. Army is hiring bat researchers to work at Aberdeen Proving Ground — and the solicitation is a reminder that one of the most significant military testing installations on the East Coast operates under biological constraints that have nothing to do with ordnance or electronics.

The Engineer Research and Development Center’s Construction Engineering Research Laboratory published a solicitation on April 30, 2026, seeking a contractor to conduct mist-netting and radio telemetry of imperiled bat species at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. The work — bat capture, tracker attachment, initial radio tracking, and guano sample collection — will take place over a four-week period during the bat roosting season at the installation, scheduled for July through August 2026. Contract award is anticipated in mid-June 2026, with proposals due by May 21.

Aberdeen Proving Ground is the Army’s primary testing and evaluation installation for ground combat systems, weapons, and electronics — home to the Army Test and Evaluation Command, the Combat Capabilities Development Command, and a dense concentration of defense research infrastructure. It occupies approximately 72,000 acres of Maryland’s upper Chesapeake Bay region, a landscape that encompasses forested uplands, wetlands, and shoreline habitat that supports wildlife populations entirely independent of what the Army is testing on its ranges. Among that wildlife are bat species that federal law and Army environmental policy require the installation to monitor, protect, and account for in its land management and operational planning.

The mist-netting methodology that the solicitation calls for is the standard approach for capturing bats in the field. Researchers string fine mesh nets across flight corridors — forest edges, stream margins, openings in vegetation — during the hours when bats are actively foraging. Bats flying through those corridors become entangled in the net, allowing researchers to safely extract them, collect biological samples, apply tracking devices, and release the animals. The technique requires skilled handling to avoid injuring the animals and is conducted under federal and state scientific collection permits that govern how bat research can be legally conducted.

Radio telemetry — attaching small transmitters to captured bats and then tracking their movements — allows researchers to identify roost sites, characterize habitat use, and understand the population structure of bat colonies on the installation. Guano sample collection adds a genomic and health dimension to the data set, enabling analysis of diet, disease prevalence, and population genetics from a non-invasive sample type. Together, these methods build the long-term occupancy dataset the Army needs to document population trends over time — understanding whether bat populations at Aberdeen are stable, growing, or declining, and which species are present in what numbers.

The “imperiled” designation in the solicitation title reflects the conservation status of the bat species involved. Several bat species in the eastern United States have experienced catastrophic population declines over the past two decades, driven primarily by white-nose syndrome — a fungal disease that has killed millions of hibernating bats across North America. Species including the northern long-eared bat, the tricolored bat, and the little brown bat have seen declines severe enough to trigger federal listing under the Endangered Species Act. The northern long-eared bat was listed as endangered in 2023. The tricolored bat received a proposed endangered listing the same year. These listings have direct implications for how military installations manage their land, conduct training operations, and plan construction or ground disturbance activities — because federal law prohibits actions that harm, harass, or kill listed species or destroy their critical habitat without specific authorization.

For Aberdeen Proving Ground, that legal framework means the Army has obligations that extend well beyond its mission to test and evaluate weapons systems. The installation must demonstrate it understands what imperiled bat species are present, where they roost, how many individuals use the installation, and how its activities affect those populations. The long-term trend data that the ERDC CERL research effort is designed to generate is the foundation of that demonstration — it allows the Army to show regulators, and the courts if necessary, that it is monitoring its impact and managing the installation in compliance with its environmental obligations.

The Army’s environmental research arm taking this work seriously is not incidental. ERDC CERL — the Construction Engineering Research Laboratory, part of the Army Corps of Engineers’ Engineer Research and Development Center — is the Army’s primary institution for research on the intersection of military installation management and natural resources. Its portfolio spans everything from invasive species control to sustainable building design to exactly this kind of wildlife monitoring work. The bat research at Aberdeen fits squarely within ERDC CERL’s mission of generating the scientific foundation that allows Army installations to operate effectively while meeting their legal and environmental obligations.