In Victoria, the Country Fire Authority (CFA) heavily relies on weekly visual observations on grassland conditions for regular and consistent sampling of curing throughout the fire season. Collected by volunteer observers, weekly visual observations are collated by CFA and are used to produce a statewide map of curing.  The traditional way of collating field observation data involves a great amount of manual processing. With a growing number of volunteer observers, however, the process has increasingly become time-consuming, resource-extensive, and vulnerable to inaccuracy, overgeneralisation and human error.

CFA established the Grassland Curing and Fire Danger Rating (GCFDR) project to obtain more accurate grassland curing information for increased accuracy of Fire Danger Ratings (FDRs) in grasslands.  As part of the main objective of the project, a prototype online system was developed in late 2012 and significantly enhanced in late 2013. It has since been deployed in operations for the 2012/2013 and 2013/2014 fire seasons. The system described in this paper facilitates an automated sequential operational workflow. The system workflow progresses from signing up new observers, to capturing and collating field observations, to running an established curing model through to production, notification and distribution of a final curing product of Victorian grasslands. The grasslands spatial product is accessible to various emergency organisations for decision support. It is also delivered to the Bureau of Meteorology as input into the Grassland Fire Danger Index (GFDI) for Victoria.  The GFDI is a significant input into the Victorian FDR system.