Monitoring Trends in Distribution and Seasonality of Medically Important Ticks in North America Using Online Crowdsourced Records from iNaturalist

Abstract

Recent increases in the incidence and geographic range of tick-borne diseases in North America are linked to the range expansion of medically important tick species, including Ixodes scapularis, Amblyomma americanum, and Amblyomma maculatum. Passive tick surveillance programs have been highly successful in collecting information on tick distribution, seasonality, host-biting activity, and pathogen infection prevalence. These have demonstrated the power of citizen or community science participation to collect country-wide, epidemiologically relevant data in a resource-efficient manner. This study examined tick observations from the online image-based biological recording platform iNaturalist to evaluate its use as an effective tool for monitoring the distributions of A. americanum, A. maculatum, I. scapularis, and Dermacentor in the United States and Canada. The distribution and seasonality of iNaturalist tick observations were found to accurately represent those of the studied species. County-level iNaturalist tick occurrence data showed good agreement with other data sources in documented areas of I. scapularis and A. americanum establishment, and highlighted numerous previously unreported counties with iNaturalist observations of these species. This study supports the use of iNaturalist data as a highly cost-effective passive tick surveillance method that can complement existing surveillance strategies to update tick distributions and identify new areas of tick establishment.

Seasonal and spatial patterns of infestation with ectoparasitic mites on New Zealand geckos revealed using a crowd‐sourced citizen science database

“…Another possibility is that geckos are more likely to be observed over the warmer summer months when weather is more favourable for field work and/or tramping, which could increase the chances of detecting ectoparasites at these times. Seasonality in ectoparasite occurrence is common in other host–parasite systems and has been detected in another study using crowd‐sourced data (Cull, 2022).…”

“…Notably, 42% of observations (n = 104 total observations) contributed by one 'user' had mites detected in them, and the average latitude of their observations was 39.51° S (0.89 SD) which could explain the second peak of prevalence around 39° S-40° S. Thus, user variability -particularly for users that are highly active -could generate patterns in the data that do not necessarily reflect biological patterns. Other studies have found highly active users account for a large number of observations, generating a bias in observations around certain localities (Di Cecco et al, 2021;Dimson & Gillespie, 2023).…”

“…The use of crowd-sourced data obtained from citizen science platforms for scientific research has increased in recent years, yielding a valuable source of data to further insights into the ecology and distribution of some species including into host-parasite ecology (Poulin et al, 2021). Collating records of parasites in their free-living phase on citizen science platforms has enabled the identification of new host species of hairworms (Doherty et al, 2021) and confirmed known seasonal patterns in tick abundance (Cull, 2022). Records from these platforms, especially for parasites that are visually conspicuous, could provide a way of tracking the distribution of parasite or vector species over time and discovering new host-parasite relationships (e.g.…”

Heartland Virus Disease—An Underreported Emerging Infection

“…A. americanum is found primarily in the south, southeast and eastern coast of the US, with scattered observations in more northerly states of the upper midwest and northeast and the lower areas of Ontario [ 54 ]. It is important to realize that these observations primarily reflect recent tick surveillance data.…”

Predicting global herbicide resistance hotspots using a 30-year-old database and machine-learning techniques

“…Similar global databases updated by the research community as a whole (as opposed to a single team or project) exist in other branches of Life Science and are used not only as references and search engines for data points, but also as entire datasets in analyses of broad-scale patterns, acknowledging that all such databases are incomplete and unevenly sampled, but sufficiently broadly sampled to represent global patterns , e.g iNaturalist (conservation and ecology; www.inaturalist.org[e.g. [24][25][26]), Treebase (phylogenetics; www.treebase.org [e.g. 27,28]), Paleobiology Database (palaeontology; paleobiodb.org [e.g.…”