Effective date: 2026-10-04
This page explains how every layer on BattleBytes is made: what it is built from, how it is processed, and what we hold back on purpose. Every layer is an approximation built from open information. Nothing on the Site is suitable for operational use.
The globe
Each conflict we track is a theatre, with a reference point, a bounding box, a status (active or watch), a trend and an intensity score between 0 and 1. The intensity score is assigned by our editors and reviewed as situations change; it reflects the scale of fighting and the volume of reported events in the theatre. On the globe, a theatre's hotspot grows with intensity, from 6 pixels across at 0 to 20 pixels at 1. Hotspots carry a static halo; nothing pulses or flashes.
The count beside each theatre in the list is the number of reported events tagged to that theatre in the last 24 hours. An event is tagged to a theatre when its location falls inside the theatre's bounding box; where boxes overlap, the smallest box wins, because it is the most specific.
Deep and overview theatres
Deep theatres have a battlefield map: control areas, a front line, gray zones, a timeline of snapshots and event pins. Overview theatres have event pins and written analysis but no control layer, either because the conflict has no stable front (insurgencies, gang wars, maritime standoffs) or because no openly licensed control map of sufficient quality exists.
Control areas
Control areas are derived from openly licensed settlement-control maps: the war-map modules on Wikipedia, in which volunteer editors record, settlement by settlement, which party holds each town and village, with citations. Those modules are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license.
We turn those points into areas in four steps:
- Read. We read each settlement's position and marked controller from the module, along with any contested marking.
- Rasterize. We lay a regular grid over the theatre. Each cell takes the controller of its nearest settlement, provided that settlement lies within a set distance; cells too far from any settlement are left unassigned.
- Mark gray zones. Cells nearest a settlement marked contested, and cells where the nearest settlements of opposing parties are about equally close, become gray zone.
- Trace. We trace the cell boundaries back into polygons and simplify them for the map.
The result is a smoothed picture of who holds which settlements. It is not a survey of trenches or positions, and it inherits the coverage, lag and editorial judgment of the underlying module. Control maps are rebuilt daily. Each battlefield map carries weekly snapshots covering roughly the last 12 weeks, plus the latest build, so the timeline scrubber shows how lines moved. The module revision behind each snapshot is recorded in the published file.
Our derived control layers are released under CC BY-SA 4.0 at /data/control/.
Front lines
The front line is the boundary between areas held by opposing parties. It is drawn as a dashed line with small triangles ("teeth") on the side that has been on the offensive in that sector, judged from recent snapshots. Where no party has clearly been advancing, the teeth reflect the last clear change.
What "gray zone" means
A gray zone is ground that no party firmly holds. In wars dominated by drones and artillery, the space between the forward positions of each side can be several kilometers deep: troops can move through it, but neither side can stay in it without being seen and struck. Settlement maps capture this as contested settlements. We show gray zones with a diagonal hatch rather than a color, because assigning that ground to either side would claim more than the evidence supports. The guide Front lines and gray zones explains why mappers often disagree about these areas.
Event pins
Event pins are generated automatically from news-event databases, chiefly the GDELT Project, which codes events from news reports worldwide every 15 minutes, and the researcher-coded event data of the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). Each event is classified into one of eight types (airstrike, drone or missile, ground clash, artillery, naval, infrastructure, unrest, humanitarian), placed at the location the coding gives, and tagged to a theatre.
Each pin is scored from 1 to 3:
- 1 — one report. Dotted ring.
- 2 — two independent reports. Dashed ring.
- 3 — three or more independent reports, or a geolocated image or video. Solid ring.
Machine-coded locations are often the center of the town or region named in a report, not the exact point of impact, and automated classification makes mistakes. Automatically generated pins are therefore shown with the unknown frame: we do not assign them to a side. When an editor reviews a pin, its type, location, side and score can be corrected; see Editorial Standards.
Other layers
- Aircraft repeats position reports that aircraft broadcast publicly over ADS-B, as aggregated by the adsb.lol community network, filtered to aircraft identified as military or government. Anyone with a receiver can see the same broadcasts. Aircraft that switch off their transponders do not appear, and we make no attempt to infer them.
- Fires shows thermal anomalies detected by NASA FIRMS satellite instruments. A thermal anomaly can be a strike, a wildfire, a gas flare or a field burn; it is not by itself evidence of an attack.
- Disasters and earthquakes come from GDACS and the U.S. Geological Survey, to separate natural events from conflict events.
- Rocket alerts for Israel are relayed from an unofficial public feed of Home Front Command alert areas. It is shown as a soft layer and may lag or miss alerts; it is never a substitute for official alerts.
Live layers are refreshed every few minutes. When a feed is unavailable, the last good data stays up and its age is shown.
Delay policy
Some information could put people at risk if it were published in real time. We delay or withhold it deliberately:
- Friendly unit positions: never. We do not plot the location of ground or naval units belonging to any party shown in blue on our maps, at any delay, and we do not plot live ground or naval unit positions for any party. The aircraft layer is the one place military platforms appear, and it only repeats what aircraft broadcast publicly over ADS-B; it reveals nothing their operators have not already made public.
- Strikes and incidents: after one hour. Event pins appear no sooner than one hour after the reported time of the event.
- Control changes: after 24 hours. A change in who holds a settlement or area appears no sooner than 24 hours after it is first reported.
Delays apply to our maps and feeds. Written analysis describes events after the fact and does not report positions in real time.
What the maps cannot tell you
The maps show what has been reported and mapped, not everything that has happened. Coverage is uneven: some theatres have dense reporting and active volunteer mappers; others have little of either. A quiet map is not proof of a quiet front. Figures, control and events are all subject to revision, and corrections are logged on the Corrections page.
Questions about this methodology: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])