- The two largest conservation technology platforms, SMART and EarthRanger, are merging into a single product known as SERCA.
- SMART and EarthRanger have overlapping functions yet are different enough that many organizations need to adopt both. Managing data across two platforms has created logistical challenges that ultimately led to the idea of merging the software.
- SERCA will combine EarthRanger’s user-friendly interface and real-time visualization with SMART’s data collection and analysis capabilities.
- The project is a collaboration between WCS, WWF, Re:wild, Panthera, North Carolina Zoo, Wildlife Protection Solutions, the Frankfurt Zoological Society and the Zoological Society of London and EarthRanger, developed by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
For years, conservation groups have relied on two leading technologies to help manage protected areas: EarthRanger, a platform for wildlife monitoring and real-time field reporting, and SMART, a conservation management software useful for logging patrol data and ranger activity. But some organizations have struggled to decide between them and even end up using both, forcing them to juggle data between two separate dashboards.
Now the two platforms are merging into a single product, known as SERCA, with the goal of simplifying wildlife monitoring, patrol management and conservation data analysis.
“It’s an enormous opportunity to deliver incredible tools across the entire world for conservationists,” EarthRanger director Jes Lefcourt told Mongabay.
SMART was created in 2011 through a partnership between nine conservation groups looking for a more efficient way of collecting and analyzing field data in protected areas. Since its creation, the software has expanded into mobile, desktop and cloud-based components that allow organizations to record field data such as wildlife encounters, illegal activity and ranger responses during patrols.
Today, the platform is used across 1,200 sites in more than 100 countries.
In Zambia, the nonprofit Zambian Carnivore Programme uses SMART to collect carnivore and herbivore data in protected areas such as South Luangwa National Park and Liuwa Plain National Park, where large carnivores face threats from habitat loss and snaring. Ecologists record group composition, hunting behavior, reproduction and interspecies dynamics of hyenas, African wild dogs, lions, leopards and cheetahs.
“You can actually see your database and manage your data, and we need to edit a lot of the data before we can use it for analysis,” Zambian Carnivore Programme data manager Elke van Gils said of why the program uses SMART.
But the platform also has limitations. It isn’t designed for real-time monitoring and has limited mapping and visualization tools, making it difficult to track threats or species sightings as they occur. It also requires significant training to use effectively. Many organizations rely on a dedicated data analyst to manage the platform and process the information collected in the field.
Even then, the large data sets generated by the platform can be difficult to digest, and some conservation groups lack the capacity to translate the information into on-the-ground decisions.
“Everyone collected a lot of data — a lot of data,” said Rony García, biological research department director at the Guatemala office of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which uses SMART to organize ranger patrols in the Maya Forest. “But very few people are really analyzing what is happening there. So the intelligence is being lost.”
Conservation groups that need real-time monitoring and mapping often prefer EarthRanger, a system created in 2015 and currently managed by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a nonprofit research institute established by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Today, the software is used at more than 900 sites in more than 80 countries.
In Chile, it helps monitor puma dens in real time, with a map showing where individuals move around their habitat throughout the day. In Thailand, it’s used to monitor elephant movement and protect against human-wildlife conflict. Other groups use it to track ranger patrols in real time rather than logging data after the fact, as is typically done with SMART.
In Guatemala, García said EarthRanger is useful for collecting data about the nesting sites of the scarlet macaw, including when individuals are present in their nests and how many eggs they’re laying.
García said the mobile platform is user-friendly and, like SMART, removes the need to take handwritten notes out in the field, which can become messy, illegible or damaged by weather.
“It’s really easy to use and easy to understand,” he said.
In many cases, SMART and EarthRanger have overlapping functions, yet are different enough that organizations need to adopt both. Managing data across two platforms has created logistical challenges, several conservation groups told Mongabay. Even after the creation of Gundi in 2023 — a bridge that allows data to move between SMART and EarthRanger — many organizations said they still wanted a single integrated system.
The proposed solution, SERCA, combines EarthRanger’s user-friendly interface and real-time visualization with SMART’s data collection and analysis capabilities.
The project is a collaboration between WCS, WWF, Re:wild, Panthera, North Carolina Zoo, Wildlife Protection Solutions, the Frankfurt Zoological Society and the Zoological Society of London and EarthRanger.
The idea of combining the platforms has been discussed since the early iterations of EarthRanger, but an agreement wasn’t reached until 2025, with development beginning this year.
“The two largest conservation technology initiatives were spending money on two parallel efforts that were headed more or less towards the same north star,” Lefcourt told Mongabay. “We came together to establish SERCA to alleviate that.”
A specific release date hasn’t yet been announced, but the rollout is expected to begin before the end of the year, according to Lefcourt. The platform will include web, mobile and desktop versions, as well as othertechnologies.
Lefcourt said users should view the new product less as a hard “launch” and more as a gradual rollout, with software updates released every two weeks after the first version is introduced. SMART will eventually be phased out as its capabilities are added to EarthRanger, which will be rebranded as SERCA.
In the meantime, most organizations are expected to continue using SMART or EarthRanger in their current forms.
“It’s something we’ve needed for a long time,” García said. “It took a long time for people to accept SMART, and getting people to switch to EarthRanger wouldn’t have been easy. But now, if they can combine them into a new product, it will make adoption much easier, and SMART users will be able to take advantage of things from EarthRanger that they didn’t have before.”
Banner image: Ranger John Tanui, who recently passed away, uses EarthRanger in the operations room at Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya. Image courtesy of Connected Conservation Foundation.
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