Coverage & Collection Gaps
Knowing what you can see is half the job; knowing where you're blind is the other half. A quiet area on the map can mean nothing is happening — or that your reporting from there has dried up. The coverage analysis surfaces that distinction, so an absence of news doesn't get mistaken for an absence of events.
Coverage gaps
The platform watches where reporting has gone silent for longer than that area's own history would predict. A region that normally produces a steady stream of reporting and then goes quiet is far more significant than one that's always been dark — and the gap analysis weights it accordingly.
A significant coverage gap can mean several things, all worth knowing:
- an information blackout — comms down, reporting suppressed,
- access denial — sources can no longer operate there, or
- deteriorating coverage — your sources for that area have simply gone stale.
Whichever it is, a gap is a prompt: either find new collection for that area, or explicitly caveat that your picture of it is thin.
Temporal patterns — surges and lulls
Alongside spatial coverage, the platform compares current activity in a given time slot against that slot's recent baseline and flags two conditions:
- Surge — activity unusually far above baseline, a possible breaking event.
- Lull — activity unusually far below baseline, a possible blackout or de-escalation.
Both are early signals — a surge tells you to look now; a lull tells you to ask why it's quiet.
Movement trends
The platform also detects sustained directional trends — when activity is consistently shifting one way across consecutive periods rather than scattering. A persistent drift can indicate advancing forces, population displacement, or an expanding incident radius. It complements the per-actor force vector and the movement projection in the Analysis panel.
How to use it
- Treat silence as a question, not an answer. Before you report "no activity," check whether it's a genuine lull or a coverage gap.
- Use gaps to drive collection. A high-significance gap is a concrete prompt to add or repair sources for that area — see Feeds & Sources.
- Read surges and movement together. A surge that's also moving in a consistent direction is a stronger signal than either alone.
Where to next
- Feeds & Sources — closing a coverage gap by adding collection.
- Escalation & Predictions — the forward-looking tools these signals feed.