Forestry Best Management Practices (BMPs) are used for protection of water quality at forest stream crossings, yet effects and costs for gradients of BMPs are not well documented. We evaluated forty-two truck road and skid trail stream crossings using three surrogates of BMP adequacy: (1) potential erosion rates for stream crossing approaches; (2) adequacy of stream crossing BMPs; and (3) overall BMP rating (BMP´, BMP-standard, and BMP+). Subsequently, BMP upgrades were recommended for enhancing BMP´or BMP-standard stream crossings. Costs for BMP upgrades were estimated using an existing road and skid trail cost method. The majority of truck road stream crossings were culverts, while skid trail stream crossings were primarily portable bridges. Potential erosion estimates, BMP audit scores, and BMP ratings all indicated that skid crossings have lower BMP implementation than truck road crossings. BMP improvements commonly identified for skid trail and truck crossings included addition of cover and water control structures. Improved BMPs at skid trail crossings were less expensive than those at truck road crossings. Current BMP guidelines provide economical and effective techniques for reducing erosion, and BMP upgrades have the potential to reduce erosion rates to similar levels found in undisturbed forests.

Do children with hearing loss use infant-directed speech? The study examined speech characteristics of a 6-year-old child with bilateral cochlear implants and an age-matched child with normal-hearing while interacting with their infant siblings (age 29 and 20 months) and with their mothers. Child-sibling and child-mother interactions were recorded in two conditions. In the “toy” condition, the children explained to their siblings and their mothers how to assemble a toy. In the “book” condition, the children narrated a story using a picture book. Sixty-five vocalizations from each child’s speech sample were extracted in each condition. Mean fundamental frequency, fundamental frequency range, utterance duration, number of syllables per utterance, and speech rate were measured. Both children produced higher fundamental frequency, expanded fundamental frequency range, shorter utterance duration, and slower speech rate in the sibling- compared to mother-directed speech in both the “book” and “toy” conditions. For the mother-directed speech only, the children produced lower fundamental frequency, longer utterance duration and more syllables per utterance in the “book” than the “toy” condition. The results suggest that children with and without hearing loss modify prosodic characteristics of their speech when interacting with a younger sibling but the strength of the modification may be task-dependent.