 I'm Terry Hanley, wildfire instructor. In grasslands in summer there are two main things that change that affect fire behavior. One, it dries out. Two, it's harvested either by people or by animals. As you can see in crops the fuel load increases as the crops grow, then drops off sharply when it is harvested. Whereas in pasture the fuel load drops off slowly as the animals graze the pasture. Measuring fuel loads helps the CFA estimate fire behavior in the summer. We are going to visually measure two fuel areas. One with a high fuel load and one with a low fuel load. We're going to burn these two areas and compare the fire behavior between each of them. First though let's look at the fuel load. We do this by measuring the fuel height and the percentage cover. Have a look around your paddock and enter the height of the grass on your card. We do this by measuring at the average height of the seed head not the leaf. So to determine the percentage cover we look at the fuel height you gave and look at the amount of fuel under that fuel height. We're a hundred percent it is totally full of fuel and zero percent is like a sandpit. And we can see from this that this one has a much higher fuel load whereas over here it has a much lower fuel load. Just like for measuring curing we break things down into thirds. So to work out the percentage cover look at which third it fits into then we look into more detail about what percentage that is. Zero to thirty percent cover is sparse such as drought or desert conditions. With sparse growth you can walk through the grass with a few stalks brushing your legs. Forty to sixty percent cover represents normal Australian conditions with thicker growth at the base and spindly stems higher up. You can walk through it touching plenty of grass. Seventy to a hundred percent cover is a thick pasture or crop which is much harder to work your way through. Here the cover is in the abundant range or seventy to a hundred percent and it's sitting on about seventy percent which means that the space under the height of the grass is seventy percent full of vegetation. You can estimate the dry fuel load from the table on the back of the car. Here the height is about one meter and the cover is about seventy percent. So the fuel load is about five point three dry tons per hectare. Now let's measure the low fuel area. As you can see the height is about ten centimetres and we'd write that on our card. We look at the percentage cover and it's about forty percent and from our cover we then can work out that the fuel load is about one ton per hectare. So now let's have a look at how these different fuel loads burn. We've installed heat sensors and poles marked at one metre intervals so we can measure the flame height. So now we'll ignite the two plots. So with data like this operation staff can look at the broad scale view of the seasonal changes and reduce the grassland fire risk.