Fig 1.
Spatial distribution of sampling sites and the relative proportion of the collected tick species in Castilla-La Mancha.
Map showing the spatial distribution of sampling areas and sites for questing ticks across Castilla-La Mancha (lower left panel) and the location of the study region within mainland Spain (upper right panel). Circular charts indicate the proportion of each of the four main tick species per sampling site, relative to the total number of adults collected for those species (other tick species that were collected at low numbers were excluded from these estimates). The total number of adult ticks collected per site is shown below each circular chart. The study areas (A1-A8) are marked in bold type letter case. Base map source: Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha, Datos Abiertos (https://datos-abiertos-mapasjccm.opendata.arcgis.com/search?tags=OrdenacionTerritorial).
Fig 2.
Projection of tick abundance models of four tick species in Castilla-La Mancha.
Spatial projection at 1 km2 spatial resolution of adult tick questing abundance models (left) and of the Multivariate Environmental Suitability Surfaces (MESS) of the models (right) to Castilla-La Mancha region. From top to bottom: Hyalomma lusitanicum (a,e), Rhipicephalus bursa (b,f), Dermacentor marginatus (c,g) and Haemaphysalis punctata (d, h). Warmer colours in the abundance maps indicate higher tick abundance, expressed as the expected number of adult ticks per sampling transect. In the MESS maps, warmer colours (pink to red) represent areas where predictive modelresults are not extrapolable, whereas white and blue colours show the areas where environmental conditions are within the range of the training dataset. Base map source: Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha, Datos Abiertos (https://datos-abiertos-mapasjccm.opendata.arcgis.com/search?tags=OrdenacionTerritorial).
Fig 3.
Environmental suitability and model extrapolation for adult ticks in Castilla-La Mancha.
Predicted suitable environment from MaxEnt models for the adults of the four tick species studied: Hyalomma lusitanicum (a), Rhipicephalus bursa (b), Dermacentor marginatus (c) and Haemaphysalis punctata (d). Spatial resolution of the maps is 1 km2. The red dots are the centroids of the 1 km2 square of species presence after cleaning and thinning. Blue colours indicate areas of low suitability, while yellow colours represent areas of high suitability. Base map source: Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha, Datos Abiertos (https://datos-abiertos-mapasjccm.opendata.arcgis.com/search?tags=OrdenacionTerritorial).
Table 1.
Output of the best fitted models (Generalized Linear Mixed Effects Models) built for questing adult tick abundance of the four studied tick species.
Table 2.
Relative contribution environmental predictors in tick suitability models.
Fig 4.
Jackknife test of predictor relevance in environmental suitability models.
Predictor codes are shown in S3 Table. From top to bottom: H. lusitanicum, R.bursa, D. marginatus and H. punctata.
Fig 5.
Species response curves for key environmental predictors affecting tick suitability.
Species response curves characterizing how the four most important predictors of each model affected the MaxEnt prediction of the four tick studied species suitability model. Predictor abbreviations are shown in S2 Table. From top to bottom: H. lusitanicum, R. bursa, D. marginatus and H. punctata. The plots show how the logistic prediction changed as each predictor varied while keeping all other predictors at their average sample value. Variable importance in the top left/right corner of each plot. Red lines/bars: mean of the 10 repetitions. Blue area/blue and turquois bars: standard deviation. In the land use (categorical) predictor chart, 1: other land uses; 2: crop; 3: grassland; 4: shrub; 5: deciduous broadleaf forest; 6: evergreen broadleaf forest 7: coniferous forest and 8: woodland.