National Park animal sighting tracker
I just went on a safari in Africa and while it was amazing, the guides spent so much time hunting for animals. The best source of information for them was the other guides they would pass. They would stop their jeep, chat about the animals they saw in the…
I just went on a safari in Africa and while it was amazing, the guides spent so much time hunting for animals. The best source of information for them was the other guides they would pass. They would stop their jeep, chat about the animals they saw in the area, and then hunt them down. They had radios as well, but they only connected to a few other guides, as otherwise they wouldn't get useful information. I think a shared GPS positioning app that shows how recently animals were spotted at what location would be a pretty valuable tool for the guides. The tour companies also have pretty deep pockets to fund it. One potential obstacle is that only 75% of the safari had internet connection, and only 95% had cell phone connection. I am sure this will steadily improve over time, but a solution that could update via text message would be even better.
Collected discussion
It needs a very easy and seamless way to report sightings or else it won't get adoption.
Click the location on the GPS, click the animal you saw.
The animals are all protected from poaching both by laws and by trackers and rangers. This app won't stop or encourage poaching.
You should talk to a variety of conservationists who work in our national parks.
The animals don't give a fuck about humans, to them we are just another big harmless herbivore. Also literally 90% of the park is areas humans can't go. If they want to go to that area of the park it's not limiting them in any way shape or form.
lol its so obvious you have no clue what you're talking about. You asked for feedback, people are giving you feedback and you're burying your head in the sand. Good strategy for success
lol no, sharing live locations of "high demand" animals is a huge no-go for any type of wildlife viewing Would it make the guides lives easier, absolutely. But it would make the animals lives much worse. If animals don't want to be seen, they go places humans dont go/cant find them. If humans have live locations they can chase an animal around all day long disrupting its behaviour, its opportunities to hunt, eat, sleep, ect. Live tracking would also reveal super sensitive spots, like dens, nests, food caches, ect and visiting them could cause animals to abandon their food or even their young. GPS collars absolutely do exist for science and conservation purposes. Opening them up to tourism would be catastrophic. Source: when I'm not software engineering, I'm wildlife photographing.
this is such a clean insight the value wasn’t the animals, it was the radio comms between guides. you basically described a shared sighting log where rangers drop “3 giraffes, north ridge, 9am” and everyone sees it. and you don’t need to hire a dev to test if that’s useful. there are AI builders now where you describe the app and it generates it a simple shared log with a map pin and a timestamp, login so only your group posts. i’ve seen people stand up exactly this kind of “tiny custom tool” on Whacka in an evening, no code, no $5k quote. the one thing i’d validate before building: is the pain “we forget what we saw” or “we can’t coordinate in real time”? those are two different apps. talk to 3 guides before you wire up a single feature.
I'm absolutely not saying don't do this, but consider the serious ethical issues. Even in the US national park service, there are many hunters that wait for a "trophy" animal to leave a park so they can legally shoot them - or just outright poach them within the park. There's also significant traffic jams when an animal is sited - often to the detriment of the animal. Off the top of my head, you could simply not show sightings near the edge of the parks to avoid informing hunters if an animal is leaving its protected area. And maybe once a certain number of users have gathered in a particular site, you could code that as "too congested" to see - and prioritize less congested sitings. It's going to get built as connectivity in the parks grow, so I'd love to see someone who does it taking the local conservationist's concerns into the design - and I personally would use one that does that over one that just straight up reports it without any consideration of the implications.