Watching over wildlife together

OpenCollar is a conservation collaboration to design, support
and deploy open-source tracking collar hardware and software
for environmental and wildlife monitoring projects

We want the development of wildlife monitoring collars to enter the world of the cooperative, Internet-based community. By making the collars’ hardware and software and other information available online, we aim to attract and inspire talented students, researchers, and tech-savvy conservationists to develop tracking systems that are more customisable and a better fit for use on different animals.

Making existing technology available for anyone who wants it also means anyone can inexpensively build and adjust collars, with for example a GPS, GSM or LoRa module, for their own use cases.As the threshold for deploying collars disappears, we hope that wildlife experts will collar more animals, generate more data, create more actionable intelligence and share as much as possible to benefit the conservation of our natural world.

Finally, bringing an audience with a passion for technology and wildlife protection into the development of these technologies will reduce cost and increase innovation overall.

Where do we start?

Smart Parks has kickstarted and funded the design and development of the first OpenCollar Elephant tracker that consist of different modules that can be combined into several different configurations, depending on the use case. We’ll publish our development and lessons learned on opencollar.io, GitHub and a forum on Wildlabs. And that’s where you come in. Jointly we’ll adjust and improve OpenCollar and make the hardware and software accessible for everyone.

What is the current status?

In 2019 we have started this initiative with the development of the OpenCollar Elephant tracker. Since then, much has happened and we are happy to show you some great results. The OpenCollar initiative now has a wide range of field-tested and proven animal protection collars, that can be applied to protect not only elephants, but also rhino, lion, cheetah, wisent, wild dog, feral cat, raccoon and more.

Where do we start?

Smart Parks has kickstarted and funded the design and development of the first OpenCollar Elephant tracker that consist of different modules that can be combined into several different configurations, depending on the use case. We’ll publish our development and lessons learned on opencollar.io, GitHub and a forum on Wildlabs. And that’s where you come in. Jointly we’ll adjust and improve OpenCollar and make the hardware and software accessible for everyone.

What is the current status?

In 2019 we have started this initiative with the development of the OpenCollar Elephant tracker. Since then, much has happened and we are happy to show you some great results. The OpenCollar initiative now has a wide range of field-tested and proven animal protection collars, that can be applied to protect not only elephants, but also rhino, lion, cheetah, wisent, wild dog, feral cat, raccoon and more.

What’s happening right now?

In 2023 we are continuing the development of new and existing collars and we are also extending the range of collars to protect even more different animals like the endangered Pangolin.

One of je most interesting advancements we are aiming for is to make Machine Learning on the Edge user friendly for these type of conservation devices. We have already showed the vision and potential power of this in the Hackster.oi ElephantEdge campaign in 2020. To make this feature available for the OpenCollar Edge devices, we need to integrate this nicely into all OpenCollar development and user elements including hardware, firmware, app, toolchain etc. We have started this work since 2020 and we are committed to get this feature available on all Edge devices with the help of the OpenCollar community.

How to get them?

To use OpenCollar products in the field, there are two main routes to follow. First, you can go to our Open-Source repositories on Github and find your way to producing them to your needs. The other option is to find an organisation that can do this for you. Smart Parks is not only the initiator of the OpenCollar initiative, it is also the organisation that is currently offering these collars to protected areas. Please find their catalog here.

Your involvement

For the next steps we continuously reach out to the community to support OpenCollar on developing new features and modules that can be added to the tracking system:

• Custom collars and enclosures
• Quick release add-on
• Solar charging
• Satellite communication
• 2G/3G/4G/5G communication
• UHF/VHF connectivity
• Edge Machine Learning
• Biosensors (heartbeat)
• Camera
• Acoustics

 

We encourage anyone who is interested in the development of OpenCollar and who’d like to partner to touch base with us. As our planet is losing wildlife at an unprecedented rate passionate and determined conservationists around the world need to join arms, share information and protect as much as we can because:

If not us, then who?
If not now, then when?

OpenCollar is initiated by Smart Parks

Supported by

Development Partners