Offshore wind farms often co-occur with biodiverse marine ecosystems with high ecological, economic, and cultural value. Yet there are many uncertainties about how wind farms affect marine organisms and their environment. The before–after–control–impact (BACI) design, an approach that compares an impact location with an unaffected control both before and after the intervention, is the most common method used to study how offshore wind farms affect finfish. Unfortunately, this design has several methodological limitations that undermine its ability to detect effects in these studies. An alternative approach, the before–after-gradient (BAG) design, would sample along a gradient with increasing distance from the turbines both before and after the intervention, and could overcome many of the limitations of BACI. The BAG design would eliminate the difficult task of finding a suitable control, allow for the assessment of the spatial scale and extent of wind farm effects, and improve statistical power by incorporating distance as an independent variable in analytical models rather than relegating it to the error term. This article explores the strengths and weaknesses of the BACI and BAG designs in the context of offshore wind development and suggests an approach to incorporating the BAG design into existing fisheries surveys and a regional monitoring framework.

中文翻译：

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监视海上风电场的渔业资源：BACI与BAG设计

海上风电场通常与具有高生态，经济和文化价值的生物多样化海洋生态系统共存。然而，关于风电场如何影响海洋生物及其环境存在许多不确定性。“控制前后影响”（BACI）设计是一种用于比较干预前后的影响位置与未受影响的控制的方法，是研究海上风电场如何影响有鳍鱼类的最常用方法。不幸的是，该设计有一些方法学上的局限性，破坏了其在这些研究中检测效应的能力。另一种方法，即渐变前（BAG）设计，可以在进行干预之前和之后，沿着与涡轮之间距离逐渐增加的梯度进行采样，并且可以克服BACI的许多局限性。BAG设计将消除寻找合适控制的艰巨任务，允许评估风场效应的空间规模和程度，并通过将距离作为独立变量纳入分析模型而不是将误差归咎于误差来提高统计能力。术语。本文探讨了在海上风电发展背景下BACI和BAG设计的优缺点，并提出了将BAG设计纳入现有渔业调查和区域监测框架的方法。