With the rapid expansion of geographic information systems (GIS) technology and its integration into the wildlife biology field, it is becoming increasingly clear that having access to the full scope of its analytical tools will greatly improve our ability to study, understand, and manage wildlife populations. We use our long-term, white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) research project as a case study to highlight the significant advances in GIS that have been benefiting investigations of wildlife. From initiation of our research, we included early GIS capabilities and we attempted to take advantage of advances as they occurred. Herein, we document changes that occurred in “wildlife GIS” over the last 15 years and how we applied them in our work. We identify a list of sources of GIS tools and data that are currently available and discuss their potential value to wildlife researchers and managers.