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Electronic Warfare Distorted Black-Headed Gull GPS Tracks

Black-headed gull in flight against a blue sky
Research · Other research

Electronic warfare in Eastern Europe is disrupting GPS data from black-headed gulls (Chroicocephalus ridibundus) migrating between Spain and breeding areas in Russia and Ukraine. An analysis published in Ambio on 13 April 2026 documented erratic, low-quality and geographically impossible positions in tracks recorded near conflict zones, with the problem becoming more pronounced in 2025.

Maps showing implausible GPS tracks of black-headed gulls near Eastern European conflict zones in 2024 and 2025
Figure 1 from Martín-Vélez et al. (2026) shows uncorrected black-headed gull GPS tracks in 2024 and 2025, including close-ups of erroneous positions around Kaliningrad and Russia. Gull illustration by Martí Franch. CC BY 4.0.

Some recorded positions were geographically impossible

The researchers examined trajectories from gulls tagged at their wintering site in Barcelona. In affected regions, the devices sometimes placed birds in Algeria or Greenland while their surrounding track remained in Eastern Europe. Other records formed near-perfect concentric circles or jumped back and forth over implausibly large distances. Low-precision and erratic positions were especially common around Kaliningrad and within Russia, and the anomalies increased in 2025.

Jamming and spoofing can corrupt wildlife tags

The patterns overlapped with areas known for electronic interference with global navigation satellite systems. Jamming floods navigation frequencies with noise so a receiver cannot calculate a reliable position. Spoofing instead supplies false signals that make the receiver report an incorrect location. The gull tags were civilian instruments that were nevertheless affected by the same GNSS interference.

A tracking point is not automatically a biological observation

Corrupted positions can be mistaken for unusual migration routes, stopovers or rapid long-distance movements and can also hide the places the birds actually used. This matters when tracking data are used to locate breeding colonies, migration corridors or other important habitats. It also affects One Health applications, which connect animal, environmental and human health: unreliable tracks make it harder to identify visits to landfills or wastewater-treatment plants that may be relevant to the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and can reduce the reliability of movement-based risk maps for highly pathogenic avian influenza such as H5N1.

The authors call for systematic identification, reporting and correction of geopolitical GNSS errors in tracking datasets. They also argue for methodological flexibility and continued use of independent, lower-tech marking and monitoring methods such as bird ringing, so that anomalous satellite positions are not mistaken for animal movements.

Sources and image credit

  1. Martín-Vélez, V., Navarro, J., Afán, I., Montalvo, T., & Green, A. J. (2026). Conflicts hinder research into animal movements. Ambio, 55, 2018–2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02395-xPrimary open-access article published 13 April 2026. It documents erratic, low-quality and geographically implausible GPS positions in 2024–2025 black-headed gull tracks overlapping known GNSS interference zones in Eastern Europe.

Image: Charles J. Sharp — adult black-headed gull in summer plumage in flight at Farmoor Reservoir, Oxfordshire, England, 13 March 2014; Wikimedia Commons Quality Image. Representative image for this story; not presented as an animal or scene from the reported study or event. · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Source

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