ScienceDaily: A recent study at Oregon State University indicates that some past approaches to calculating the impacts of forest fires have grossly overestimated the number of live trees that burn up and the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere as a result. The research was done on the Metolius River Watershed in the central Oregon Cascade Range, where about one-third — or 100,000 acres — of the area burned in four large fires in 2002-03. Although some previous studies assumed …