Introduction: "Swidden agriculture , also known as shifting cultivation or slash - and - burn farming, is an age - old and prevailing subsistence farming practice in the tropical regions [1 ? 4]. T here are 40 ? 50 countries globally [5] with almost 300 ? 500 million people directly or indirectly carrying out this traditional swiddening system [6 ? 8]. Evidences from a recent meta - analysis published by van Vliet et al. [9] suggest that these swidden cultivators are mostly located in the mountainous and hilly parts of Latin America, Central Africa and Southeast A sia (SEA). Based on the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Science database ( 8 October 2013) , swidden agriculture is mainly practiced by smallholder farmers in a conservative estimate of 64 developing countries (Figure 1 , [9 ? 25] ) from Africa, Latin America, and South/Southeast Asia. Forty - five of them are part of the United Nations collaborative initiative on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (or the UN - REDD Programme) partner countries (currently 48 in total). It sh ows that the monitoring of swidden agriculture will greatly contribute to implementing and managing the REDD projects"