Background <p>Fuel metric derived from mobile laser scanners (MLS) have been used in forested areas to quantify fuel connectivity (or ladder fuels) and have potential to be applied to low woodlands and shrublands. Connectivity of fuel is important in shrublands as it relates to go/no-go and onset of crown fire thresholds. Coastal mallee is an exemplar of a fire-prone sclerophyllous shrubland found in Mediterranean climates and is important to characterize for potential thresholds to ignition, fire spread, and crown fire. Existing wildfire models developed for similar fuels rely on canopy height and cover; however, previous research suggests additional MLS-derived vertical and horizontal connectivity metrics may supplement and improve understanding of fire behavior in these fire-prone shrublands.</p> Results <p>Point clouds were created from MLS surveys of 25 coastal mallee plots in South Australia. We compared strata-derived metrics, horizontal fuel metrics, and vertical fuel metrics by examining the correlation between metrics and with simpler canopy height measurements. We compared the mean and variance between 10 × 10 m subplots and the whole plot for each metric using Welch’s <i>t</i>-test and Fligner–Killeen test, respectively. We also test each metric’s ability to discriminate between age-rainfall classes and geographic regions using Kruskal–Wallis rank sum test. The height of the first and second strata together with the maximum vertical strata gap were the most useful strata-derived fuel metrics. They were not correlated with other simpler height metrics nor with each other and were significantly different between age-rainfall classes and geographic regions. Overstory cover is the preferred horizontal fuel metric over total vegetation cover above 0.5 m as the median overstory cover values were significantly different between geographic regions and had a wider range of values. Canopy height, height skewness, gap fraction, and vertical complexity index performed the best for low correlation with other metrics, insensitivity to plot size and ability to discriminate between age-rainfall classes and geographic regions.</p> Conclusions <p>MLS-derived fuel metrics provide a robust method of measuring horizontal and vertical fuel connectivity in coastal mallee shrublands. These metrics can be used in studies of fire behavior in Mediterranean climate shrublands to improve the understanding of ladder fuels and fuel structure in fire behavior of these fire-prone ecosystems. These metrics improve on current fuel assessment methods in objectivity, repeatability, and sampling time.</p>