See every aircraft in the sky, updated every few seconds. OpenSky Network, a volunteer network of flight receivers, shows thousands of passenger and cargo flights around the world — where each one is, how high, how fast and which way it is heading.

A separate military layer shows the planes that everyday flight apps hide: military aircraft, surveillance flights circling an area, refuelling tankers and evacuation flights. It comes from adsb.lol, a free community flight tracker, or from ADS-B Exchange if your organization has its own subscription. These planes stand out on the map with their own color and a name tag — because if a military aircraft is circling near your convoy, you want to notice.

CelesTrak, a public satellite catalog, shows the satellites passing overhead — the International Space Station, Starlink and others. You can see where each one has been and where it will be over the next ninety minutes, which helps you know when fresh satellite photos of an area might be possible.

ACLED, a respected research group that records political violence around the world, shows armed clashes, attacks on civilians, riots and kidnappings. Each one appears as a red pin — bigger when more people were killed. Click a pin to see who was involved, what happened and when.

NASA’s fire-watching satellites show every fire spotted in the last day. That includes wildfires, and it includes the burning homes that often follow an attack on a village.

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) show where people have been forced from their homes: how many in each country, and the camps and sites where they are staying. In Nigeria, IOM’s displacement tracking adds how many displaced people are sheltering in each state and local government area.

Records of attacks, illegal mining sites, occupied farmland, displacement and road access come from Issachar GroundTruth — datasets that your organization and its partners keep and check. Every record lists its sources and a rating for how far they can be trusted, and an attack shows the deaths confirmed apart from the deaths reported. Where records crowd together they gather into numbered clusters that split apart as you zoom in. A filled marker has been verified and a hollow one is still being checked. A dashed ring means the place is only known to the nearest district or state, not the village.

None of these sources were built to work together. Overwatch exists so that they can.

Using road maps from OpenStreetMap, the free world map built by volunteers, Overwatch shows traffic moving along the real roads. The moving dots are not actual cars — they show which roads are alive. When one stretch suddenly goes quiet while the roads around it stay busy, you see it right away. That contrast is often the first warning.

The same goes for the internet. IODA, a project at Georgia Tech, watches for internet outages in every country and in each of Nigeria’s states, and Overwatch checks it every five minutes. When a state’s networks suddenly go dark, it can come just before or during an attack, or with a shutdown ordered by the authorities. If your organization adds a free Cloudflare Radar key, the map also shows the reported cause when one is known: a government shutdown, military action, a power cut, a cut cable or bad weather.

Search for any place by name and the map flies you there. Click anything on the map and Overwatch tells you where it is — the country, state, district and ward. Searches go through ISSACHAR, so outside map services never see who is searching.

Zoom in on an area and ask for local landmarks — clinics, schools, mosques, churches, fuel stations, water points — and Overwatch adds them to the map.

Earthquakes from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the government agency that tracks them worldwide, are the quietest part of the map most days — and the most important the day the ground shakes. Each quake shows up within a minute or so, sized by strength and colored by depth. If your team works in an earthquake-prone region — Türkiye, Indonesia, Nepal, the Andes, the western US — it is already on the same map as everything else. No need to jump to another website the moment it matters.

It also shows why Overwatch exists. Earthquake data is free and public. It has been free and public for thirty years. The only reason it does not already sit next to the convoy you are running, the camp you are managing, and the airspace you are watching is that nobody bothered to put it there. That is the whole job. That is Overwatch.

GDACS, the disaster alert system run by the United Nations and the European Commission, and NASA EONET add the natural hazards: floods, tropical cyclones, droughts, volcanoes and dust storms, checked every ten minutes. Each GDACS event carries an alert level from its impact model — green, orange or red — and selecting one draws its footprint on the ground: a flood’s extent, a cyclone’s wind zones and track. Seasonal floods can displace hundreds of thousands of people in Nigeria and across the Sahel in a bad year; now they sit on the same map as the camps they fill.

Often the first sign of trouble is people talking about it. Overwatch listens to news and social media for reports of attacks and violence, and shows where the talk is coming from as a heat map — brighter where more people are posting. It checks for new reports every few minutes.

GDELT, a free project that tracks news from tens of thousands of outlets in more than a hundred languages, is the backbone. Each article is placed on the map where it happened, and you can click through to its headline, outlet and date.

Posts from the social networks Bluesky, Mastodon and Telegram add what people on the ground are saying. For Telegram, your organization chooses which channels to follow. The same story is only counted once, however many places it appears.

If one of these sources isn’t set up, the map still works. News alone is enough to be useful; each extra source makes the picture richer.

Sometimes you need to see the place itself. The Copernicus Sentinel satellites of the European Space Agency photograph every place on Earth every few days, and their pictures are free. Overwatch draws the outline of each recent picture on the ground: Sentinel-2 photos, which need clear skies, and Sentinel-1 radar, which sees through cloud and at night. Photos come with a preview, so you can tell at a glance whether one is clear enough to use.

For a closer look back in time, the Wayback archive holds every release of Esri’s World Imagery since 2014 — sharp enough to make out single buildings. Pick a place, or select an attack record or an alert, and Overwatch lists every picture taken of that spot, with its date and the satellite that took it. With an event selected, the pictures just before and just after it are picked for you. Press BLINK and the map flips between the two, so homes that were standing and are now gone are hard to miss.

When nothing recent is good enough, order fresh high-resolution imagery through your organization’s own UP42 account. Search what is available over a point, see the price before anything is ordered, and request the picture you want. Nothing is bought until an administrator in your organization approves the price. When the imagery arrives it is laid on the globe for your organization alone.

Wayback and bought imagery use your organization’s own Esri and UP42 accounts, under your own agreements with them. ISSACHAR provides the tools, not the pictures, and never puts this imagery on public alert pages.