Is composition of vertebrates an indicator of the prevalence of tick-borne pathogens?

ABSTRACT: Communities of vertebrates tend to appear together under similar ranges of environmental features. This study explores whether an explicit combination of vertebrates and their contact rates with a tick vector might constitute an indicator of the prevalence of a pathogen in the quest for ticks at the western Palearctic scale. We asked how 'indicator' communities could be 'markers' of the actual infection rates of the tick in the field of two species of Borrelia (a bacterium transmitted by the tick Ixodes ricinus). We approached an unsupervised classification of the territory to obtain clusters on the grounds of abundance of each vertebrate and contact rates with the tick. Statistical models based on Neural Networks, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, and AdaBoost were detect th

SUBMITTER: Estrada-Pena A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8757609 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature