How opspoor Shares Sightings Responsibly

Sharing sightings helps visitors enjoy a park, but shared the wrong way it sends a line of cars racing to one animal. In 2016 SANParks said sightings apps had led to speeding, congestion at sightings and roadkill. Exact locations, shared instantly, to many people at once: that combination is what causes the crowding.

opspoor was built from its first version so that sharing a sighting does not do this. The rules below are enforced by our server for every sighting, in every park. Users cannot switch them off.

1. Every sighting is delayed

A sighting only appears to other people 45 minutes after it was logged in the app, and 2 hours after on this website. Our server holds the location back until then; it is not just hidden on screen. By the time anyone else sees it, the information is useful for planning and learning, not for chasing.

The person who logged the sighting always sees their own exact location.

2. Every location is blurred

Every location shown to other people in the app is moved 100 to 200 m in a random direction. For sensitive species the offset is 400 to 600 m. On this website every sighting gets the wider 400 to 600 m offset. The offset is fixed for each sighting, so it cannot be averaged out by reloading.

Species we currently treat as sensitive:

• Lion, leopard and cheetah
• African wild dog
• Elephant
• Ground pangolin
• Vultures (Cape, Egyptian, hooded, lappet-faced, white-backed and white-headed)
• Kalahari tent tortoise

3. Rhino locations are never shared

Our server rejects rhino sightings, so a rhino location is never published in the app or on this website.

4. Crowded sightings are avoided

Visitors at a sighting can report the traffic there as light, moderate or heavy. When the sighting the app would recommend on its home screen has heavy reported traffic, it recommends the best alternative without heavy traffic instead.

5. Quiet roads are rewarded

Each day, in each park, the app marks up to five roads of at least 1 km where nobody has logged a sighting that week, spread across the park. The first visitor to log a sighting on one earns bonus points in the app’s trip game. Sightings of sensitive species never count, so a bonus can never point to a sensitive animal.

6. Planning, not chasing

Instead of sending visitors to a single animal, opspoor helps them decide where and when to spend their time.

• Today’s Outlook shows which species have been seen where, and at what time of day, over the past 90 days and in the same season of earlier years.
• Where to look shows, for each species, the roads that run through the most suitable habitat.

Both point to several areas at once, so visitors spread out across the park instead of heading for the same spot.

7. We don’t tell you to hurry

Wording that tells people to rush works against everything above. In October 2026 we removed words like “go now”, “real-time” and “intercept” from the app and this website, and replaced them with planning language.

Our numbers

opspoor is new, so these numbers are small. They cover the first sighting on 12 July 2026 up to 14 October 2026, counted directly from our sightings database.

• 139 sightings logged across 5 parks.
• 100% were delayed before other people could see them, and 100% were shown with a blurred location.
• 40 (29%) were of sensitive species and shown with the wider 400 to 600 m offset.
• 0 rhino locations published.
• 23 traffic reports from visitors at sightings.

We will update these figures at least once a year.

For parks and conservation organizations

We are happy to share anonymized, aggregated sightings and traffic data with park authorities and conservation organizations, and to change how we share sightings if it helps protect wildlife. Please get in touch.

For how we ask visitors to behave at sightings, see our wildlife responsibility guidelines.

Download opspoor and plan your drives without adding to the queue.