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Soil erosion is a serious environmental problem in Guizhou Province, which is located in the centre of the karst areas of southwestern China. Unfortunately, Guizhou Province suffers from a lack of financial resources to research, monitor and model soil erosion at large watershed. In order to assess the soil erosion risk, soil erosion modeling at the watershed scale are urgently needed to be undertaken. This study integrated the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) with a Geographic Information System (GIS) to estimate soil loss and identify the risk erosion areas in the Maotiao River watershed, which is a typical rural watershed in Guizhou Province. All factors used in the RUSLE were calculated for the watershed using local data. It was classified into five categories ranging from minimal risk to extreme erosion risk depending on the calculated soil erosion amount. The soil erosion map was linked to land use, elevation and slope maps to explore the relationship between soil erosion and environmental factors and identify the areas of soil erosion risk. The results can be used to advice the local government in prioritizing the areas of immediate erosion mitigation. The integrated approach allows for relatively easy, fast, and cost-effective estimation of spatially distributed soil erosion. It thus indicates that RUSLE-GIS model is a useful and efficient tool for evaluating and mapping soil erosion risk at a large watershed scale in Guizhou Province.

Objective: To examine the reliability and validity of a 66-item version of the Gross Motor Function Measure (GMFM-66) to assess the gross motor functions of children <3 yrs old with cerebral palsy., Design: 298 valid samples were obtained from 171 children with cerebral palsy (male 126, female 45, mean age 19 mos, age range 3-36 mos) measured with GMFM-88. Then a 73-item version of GMFM (GMFM-73) special for these children was obtained by Rasch analysis. GMFM-66 score and GMFM-73 scores of each sample were obtained. The reliability and validity of GMFM-66 were evaluated by analyzing the correlation between the scores and between the change scores of these two GMFM versions. The relative precision of GMFM-73 vs. GMFM-66 was also analyzed., Results: The test-retest reliability and interscorer reliability of GMFM-66 were both high. The ICC scores were 0.9666 and 0.9782, respectively. Significant correlations were found between the scores (r = 0.9848, P < 0.001) and between the change scores (r = 0.8700, P < 0.001) of these two versions of GMFM. A 14% less gain in relative precision was achieved when using GMFM-73 vs. GMFM-66., Conclusion: Results indicated that the GMFM-66 had good reliability and validity in assessing the gross motor functions of children <3 yrs old with cerebral palsy. The GMFM-73 derived in the present study did not function significantly better for young children than GMFM-66.