ScienceDaily: When scientists torched an entire 22-acre watershed in Portugal in a recent experiment, their research yielded a counterintuitive result: Large, hot fires do not necessarily beget hot, scorched soil.
It's well known that wildfires can leave surface soil burned and barren, which increases the risk of erosion and hinders a landscape's ability to recover. But the scientists' fiery test found that the hotter the fire -- and the denser the vegetation feeding the flames -- the less the underlying soil...