Predicting Tick Presence by Environmental Risk Mapping

Predicting Tick Presence by Environmental Risk Mapping

Public health statistics recorded an increasing trend in the incidence of tick bites and erythema migrans (EM) in the Netherlands. We investigated whether the disease incidence could be predicted by a spatially explicit categorization model, based on environmental factors and a training set of tick absence-presence data. Presence and absence of Ixodes ricinus were determined by the blanket-drag...

Tick [Genome Mapping]

Predicting Novel Tick Vectors of Zoonotic Disease

With the resurgence of tick-borne diseases such as Lyme disease and the emergence of new pathogens such as Powassan virus, understanding what distinguishes vector from non-vector species, and predicting undiscovered tick vectors is an important step towards mitigating human disease risk. We apply generalized boosted regression to interrogate over 90 features for over 240 species of Ixodes ticks...

[Mapping of parasitological environmental data: the tick Ixodes ricinus--a case of study].

While the mapping of health data is not new for epidemiologists the incorporation of differentiated environmental factors, e.g., temperature, rainfall, humidity, elevation, vegetation type, host abundance and distribution, zoonotic reservoirs of infection can create a new opportunities for parasitologists. Suitable tools for spatial modeling of health problems and pathogen occurrence in space a...

Reducing the presence of navigation risk eliminates strong environmental illusions.

Many researchers have assumed that navigational costs, as opposed to the visual stimuli per se, produce several large-magnitude distance illusions-in spite of the absence of experimental data. We used virtual reality to remove the presence of realistic falling costs, while leaving the visual information otherwise intact. This resulted in removal of the distance illusions proposed to have evolve...