 I'm Terry Hanley, wildfire instructor. In grasslands, in summer, there are two main things that change that affect fire behaviour. 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 behaviour 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 behaviour 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 draw a line on your card at the height of the grass. 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, where 100% it is totally full of fuel and 0% is like a sand pit. 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. 0% to 30% 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. 40% to 60% 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. 70% to 100% 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 70% to 100%, and it's sitting on about 70%, which means that the space under the height of the grass is 70% full of vegetation. You can estimate the dry fuel load from the table on the back of the card. Here the height is about 1 metre, and the cover is about 70%. So the fuel load is about 5.3 dry tonnes per hectare. Now let's measure the low fuel area. As you can see, the height is about 10 centimetres, and we'd write that on our card. We look at the percentage cover, and it's about 40%. And from our cover we then can work out that the fuel load is about 1 tonne per hectare. So now let's have a look at how these different fuel loads burn. We have installed heat sensors and poles marked at 1 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.