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C-DRONE GUIDE · 28 JULY 2026

French legal brush-clearance obligations (OLD): drone mapping and monitoring, price

In fire-prone woodland areas, the French forestry code requires brush clearance around buildings — at least fifty metres, more where local orders demand it. These legal clearance obligations (OLD), long poorly enforced, have moved to the front line since the great fires of 2022 and the law of 10 July 2023, which strengthened their scope, buyer information and penalties. The practical problem remained: how does a municipality check, every spring, hundreds of plots at the wildland-urban interface, often sloping, fenced, invisible from the road? The drone provides a proportionate answer: a fresh, objective map of clearance status, plot by plot. Here are the framework, the method and prices observed in 2026.

Published on 28 July 2026, reviewed on 28 July 2026 — regulations in force as of July 2026.

The obligations: an individual duty, municipal enforcement

The principle is simple: in classified exposed areas, every building owner must clear brush around their structure — reduce low vegetation, space out crowns, prune, move combustibles away — to break the fire's continuity. The law of 10 July 2023 tightened the system: mandatory information for buyers and tenants, higher penalties, and more pressure on mayors, who enforce it in their municipality. And the thankless task does fall to the mayor: identifying the plots concerned, recording breaches, serving formal notice, and where necessary having the work done at the owner's expense.

The stakes are not administrative but vital: most houses destroyed by wildfires are lost at the wildland-urban interface. A study by Volker Radeloff and co-authors published in 2018 in PNAS showed, for the United States, the very rapid growth of this interface and the worsening fire risk that comes with it (see the study on Google Scholar) — a dynamic familiar to every French fire-prone region, from the Mediterranean coast to the Landes forest.

Mapping clearance status, plot by plot

The typical mission flies in late winter or spring, before the risk season. The drone surveys the municipality's wildland-urban interface and produces a high-resolution orthophoto on which, crossed with the cadastre and the zones subject to clearance, each fifty-metre perimeter can be read directly: continuous or broken low vegetation, touching crowns, combustible hedges against façades, firewood stacked under windows. A vegetation height model, derived from photogrammetry, helps quantify density — the same mechanics as for vegetation under power lines, another mandatory clearance.

The deliverable is a municipal map of apparent compliance, with a sheet per sensitive plot: dated aerial photo, annotated attention points. Enough to target awareness letters, prioritise field visits — which remain necessary for formal reports — and track change year on year.

For owners and managers: proving, planning, costing

The drone is not only for enforcement: the owner of a large plot, a campsite, an edge-of-forest housing estate or an estate manager uses the same mapping to plan and prove their clearance. The pre-works orthophoto grounds the contractor's quote (real areas, slopes, access); the dated post-works one documents compliance — useful towards the insurer, a buyer, or in litigation after a fire. Public-facing establishments in exposed areas (campsites in particular) gain solid evidence for their safety obligations.

This preventive logic completes the other summer uses of drones we describe in our fire prevention patrols and post-fire hot spot detection guides: before, during, after — the same tool serves the whole risk chain.

Flight regulations and the enforcement framework

Two frameworks overlap. On the airspace side, the wildland-urban interface mixes inhabited zones and natural areas: the pilot applies the appropriate scenarios and checks local restrictions — classified woodlands, Natura 2000 sites, and in summer the temporary bans tied to fire risk and aerial firefighting, which override everything. A private drone never flies when firefighting aircraft are engaged.

On the civil liberties side, the mapping targets vegetation, not people: flights are scheduled outside occupancy, images serve plot-level analysis, and the municipality's use of them falls within its policing powers with the usual GDPR precautions — those of our GDPR and professional drones guide. Transparency also works as strategy: municipalities that announce the mapping campaign see a wave of spontaneous clearing before the first flight.

Prices observed in 2026

Ranges observed in 2026 (excl. VAT):

An annual campaign costs less than a single contested enforced clearance — and incomparably less than a fire reaching homes. Request a quote stating the municipality, estimated interface area and goal (awareness, enforcement, proof).

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Put it into practice

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