How opspoor's Sighting Data Actually Works
Every stat on opspoor comes from real wildlife sightings. Here's exactly how a sighting is logged, checked, confirmed by other trackers and reviewers, protected, and turned into a "best time to see" figure.
Most wildlife travel content is written once and never updated: a guidebook estimate or one trip's impressions, copied across a dozen sites. opspoor works differently. Every "best time to see" figure on this site traces back to real sightings, logged by real people, in the park, at the time they happened.
That only means something if the sightings can be trusted. This post explains exactly what happens to a sighting from the moment someone logs it to the moment it shows up in a statistic: what gets recorded, how it's checked and confirmed, how animals are protected, and why some pages deliberately say there isn't enough data yet.
1. It starts with someone in the park
opspoor is built for visitors, guides and rangers out in South Africa's parks. When someone taps Log a Sighting, the app records:
The species, chosen from the park's species list or identified from a photo with opspoor's on-device AI species identification.
Where and when: the GPS position and the time of the sighting, taken from the phone rather than typed in.
Optional detail: how many animals, what they were doing, which way they were moving, how close they were to the road, and photos or video.
Most parks have little or no cell signal, so the app was built offline-first. A sighting logged in a dead zone is saved on the phone with its original time and position, then synced automatically when the phone is back in range. A sighting logged at 06:10 and uploaded at 11:00 still counts as a 06:10 sighting.
2. Automatic checks
As soon as a sighting reaches opspoor, a set of automatic checks runs on it:
Is it inside the park? The position is checked against the park's boundary.
Where on the road network is it? The sighting is matched to the nearest park road, which is what makes road-level information like hot roads and route planning possible.
Is it a duplicate? When several people log the same animal at the same place and time, which happens a lot at a good sighting, opspoor links those logs together as one encounter. Five cars at one leopard is one leopard, not five, and the statistics count it that way.
3. Other trackers confirm it
Every new sighting appears straight away in the feed's Help Confirm tab. Other opspoor users who were there, or who saw the same animal, can confirm it. Once enough trackers confirm a sighting, it moves to Confirmed.
Not every confirmation counts equally. opspoor builds a confidence score for each sighting from several signals, including:
how many people confirmed it
how independent those confirmations are: several people confirming from different places and at different times carries more weight than a cluster of confirmations arriving all at once
the track record of the person who logged it and of the people confirming it, with extra weight for experienced trackers and rangers
Checks are also in place to stop people from gaming the system, such as a group of accounts confirming each other's sightings.
Quiet parks and busy parks
Confirmation needs people. In a busy park, there are usually enough opspoor users around for sightings to be confirmed by others. In a quieter park with fewer active observers, a strict "someone else must confirm it" rule would mean almost nothing ever gets through. So opspoor adapts: while a park has only a few active observers, a single careful observer's sighting can count on its own, and once a park has enough active observers, sightings need confirmation from other people again. Park pages built on single-observer sightings are shown as early signals rather than settled patterns.
4. People review what the system can't settle
Automatic checks and community confirmation handle most sightings, but not all of them. Sightings that look unusual or conflict with other data, and sightings that someone has reported, go to reviewers who approve or reject them. A reviewer's decision is final, and sightings that are rejected are left out of every public statistic.
Trust works both ways. People who consistently log accurate sightings build up a track record that adds weight to what they log and confirm. Accounts that repeatedly log sightings that don't hold up lose that weight.
5. Protecting the animals
A live wildlife map can put pressure on animals if it's built carelessly. opspoor has several protections built in:
A delay before exact positions appear. New sightings aren't shown on the map at their precise location straight away. The delay discourages people from racing across the park to a sighting and crowding the animal, and it's longer on the public website than in the app.
Shown positions are approximate. Sighting pins are shown slightly offset from the exact spot, which is enough to know which area and road to check without pinpointing an animal.
Extra protection for sensitive species. For species at risk from poaching, the shown location is shifted by several hundred meters, and precise positions are never made public. Rhino can't be logged on opspoor at all.
Old sightings age off the map. A sighting from yesterday isn't shown as if it were current.
These protections apply to what's shown. Statistics like "best time of day" use sightings in aggregate, as counts by hour, month and area, so they're useful for planning without revealing where any individual animal is. Read more about this on our ethics page.
6. How the statistics are built
The "best time to see" figures on park and species pages are built only from sightings that have been confirmed or approved. Rejected sightings are excluded, and duplicate logs of the same encounter are counted once.
Times are grouped by park time, which is South African time, not the time zone of the phone that logged the sighting. A visitor from Europe whose phone is still set to home time doesn't shift the pattern by two hours. This sounds like a small detail, but getting it wrong would quietly push every "best time" off by hours.
7. Why some pages say "not enough data yet"
You'll notice some park and species pages don't make a "best time to see" claim at all. That's deliberate. When the number of confirmed sightings for a species in a park is still too small to mean anything, the site holds back rather than presenting a guess as a pattern.
When there's a pattern forming but not yet a settled one, we say so. Our Pilanesberg elephants, lions and leopards post shows this in practice: it sets what the sightings show alongside what's known about each species, and explains how the leopard pattern shifted as more sightings came in.
What opspoor data is good for, and what it isn't
It's good for:
knowing what's been seen in a park recently, and where
understanding when and where species tend to turn up in a specific park, based on that park's own sightings
seeing how patterns change through the seasons
It isn't:
a guarantee. Wild animals move. A strong pattern improves your odds; it doesn't promise a sighting.
a scientific census. Sightings come from where people drive, so busy roads are better covered than remote ones. Treat the data as a planning tool, not a population count.
How the picture gets sharper
Every sighting logged adds another real data point, and park and species pages update automatically as the numbers grow. No manual rewrites and no stale guidebook text: the patterns get sharper every time people are out in the parks.
Frequently asked questions
Where does opspoor's sighting data come from?
From opspoor users, including visitors, guides and rangers, who log sightings in the app while they're in the park.
What does "Confirmed" mean?
That other trackers have confirmed the sighting, or that a reviewer has approved it. Only confirmed or approved sightings count toward the statistics on this site.
Can people see exactly where an animal is?
No. Positions are shown approximately and after a delay, and sensitive species get extra protection, with their shown location shifted by several hundred meters. Rhino can't be logged on opspoor at all.
What happens to a sighting logged with no signal?
It's saved on the phone with its original time and position, then synced automatically once the phone is back in range.
Why do some pages have no "best time to see" information?
Because there aren't enough confirmed sightings for that species in that park yet. We'd rather show nothing than a guess.
Add to the picture
If you're heading to any of the parks opspoor covers, download the app, Log a Sighting when you find something, and confirm other people's sightings when you've seen the same animal. You're not just keeping a record of your own trip; you're improving the picture for everyone planning theirs.
