In Laos, a landlocked country in Southeast Asia, shifting cultivation is a traditional agricultural practice involving the clearing of natural vegetation, temporary farming, followed by extended periods of abandonment to allow vegetation regrowth, with fire being central to land clearance. Recent pressures from population growth and globalization have drastically increased fire intensity, as competition for land grows and more areas are burned for large- scale commercial agricultural use.

This project uses historic and real-time fire data from NASA and combines this with land use data from scientific studies, to provide new insights on the types of agricultural fires in Laos. The website intends to serve as a tool for examining these trends and establishing a basis for future data updates and ongoing monitoring of agricultural activities in relation to fires in Laos.

The heatmaps are designed to mimic the appearance of fire by using a fine cell size and two distinctive colour gradient scales: purple to yellow representing shifting cultivation fires and orange to yellow representing commercial expansion fires.