Methods for visualizing the explosive remnants of war

•We define the requirements for landmine contamination visualization of different user groups.•We provide a comprehensive framework for visualizing landmine contamination.•We integrate issues of data confidentiality along country borders.•We enhance cartographic visualization capabilities using kernel density estimation.

This study aimed to answer the question how cartography can help decision makers visualize the problem of contamination by explosive remnants of war (ERW). We thus explored a set of six cartographic visualization methods and systematically evaluated their usefulness with respect to four categories of stakeholders in the humanitarian demining process (i.e., database administrators, operations officers, directors of national mine action authorities, and donors) at four geographical scales, ranging from municipal to global. The main application of our work is for stakeholders involved in humanitarian demining. We provide them with a comprehensive framework for visualizing ERW hazards at the geographical scale at which they have to make decisions, as well as customized cartographic visualization tools and recommendations to help them make informed decisions. For example, we provide potential donors with a method for obtaining a global overview of ERW contamination while remaining aware of regional variation and hot spots. We also enhance cartographic visualization capabilities using traditional kernel density estimation by customizing key parameters. Specifically, we propose a method for adjusting kernel bandwidth for datasets with highly heterogeneous spatial distributions and a method for generating kernel surfaces from polygon data that consists of infilling the polygons with points before using them as inputs in the kernel density estimation.