where is the mean difference between control and impact, i is the change in difference from before to

after, and εik is the error associated with the differences. Here X represents the ecologically relevant
variable, e.g. the abundance of an organism. In many cases the data are first log transformed and the
analysis may be thought of as an analysis of ratios of abundance in the control area vs. the impact area.
The differences, Dik , may then be compared for the before period with the after period using a
twosample test. If there is no impact, the differences in the before period should be similar to those in
the after period. If a two-sample t-test is used then the result is equivalent to the test of interaction [19,
24]. This approach has been referred to either as the paired BACI design (BACIP, [4]) or the BACI paired
series (BACIPS) design [7]. An extension of this design is to take multiple measurements at each time.
These would be viewed as subsamples and would add another error term to the ANOVA table [26, Table
1a].