Are you traveling on vacation? This feature on Google Maps alerts you to forest fires – Communication – Science and technology

Google has started showing fires in European holiday destinations on Maps. It will thus help in planning and changing summer vacations.

Google Maps will now warn about forest fires in Europe.

What was once just the work of an unfortunate accident is becoming a common occurrence. Climate change brings with it more and more forest fires, which plague many European countries. Due to high temperatures and little precipitation, fires are gaining strength and endangering people’s homes and lives. Only last year, the Greek region of Alexandroupolis was engulfed by the largest forest fire in Europe, which reduced more than 96 thousand hectares of land. Greece also had to deal with a large-scale forest fire in 2021, when thousands of residents and tourists had to be evacuated on the island of Euboea. In the same year, firefighters around Palermo in Sicily had to evacuate many visitors and residents due to fires. The worst thing about it all is that fires spread uncontrollably, and even from a small outbreak, the fire can quickly spread to large areas. This, of course, complicates vacation planning.

That’s why Google has made available a new function in Maps in Europe, which, using artificial intelligence, can identify forest fires and accurately plot them on maps. Google officially introduced the function in 2020, but it was only available in a handful of countries. Namely in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Australia. Residents or visitors of 13 European countries and the African countries of Kenya and Rwanda will now be able to use it. Forest fire warnings and their extent are available in Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Monaco, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Turkey.

Google boasted that its artificial intelligence was able to identify and map more than 40 fires in southern Europe in just the last two months, including fires in Spain, Greece and Cyprus. Maps warn of fires, for example, in navigation and also in notifications that are automatically activated for owners of Android smartphones. The notification is automatically delivered to users located in the affected areas.