During the 4th annual Cisco Ecole Polytechnique Symposium, Smart Parks revealed the first working prototype of an Elephant tracker as part of the OpenCollar initiative. With new insights from the experts at this event and from the community, the collar will be improved to create a new version that will be deployed later this year and showcased on opencollar.io.
Host Mark Townsley proudly showing our first elephant collar.
The symposium in Paris focused on the challenges and opportunities associated with the use of digital technologies for the conservation of wildlife. The conference gathered passionate speakers from around the globe working in a wide range of relevant subject areas. By bringing experts together, Cisco wanted to create a community and environment to drive open collaboration and alignment between Cisco and conservation experts.
One of the outcomes of this eco-gathering was our connection with Damian Otiemo who is the Tech Lab director at the Conservation Tech Lab at Ol Pejeta Conservancy. The lab delivers technology solutions and services that support biodiversity conservation and community welfare and it is hoped it will serve as a model for global conservation efforts. The park is world famous for sheltering the last two remaining female northern white rhino. Smart Parks will provide them in July with a LoRaWAN gateway and several tracking sensors to improve wildlife protection.
Co-founder Laurens de Groot: “With symposiums like these you can meet people from all walks of life. And when you see what they are working on and you can implement that into conservation, then we can create better solutions to protect biodiversity and that is the most important thing we need to focus on.”
A short impression and an overview of the speakers can be seen in the video below.
