Features in and around residential gardens affecting the presence and abundance of questing Ixodes ricinus ticks

ABSTRACT

People may be exposed to questing Ixodes ricinus ticks in urban settings, e.g. residential gardens. Little is known about the garden characteristics that support a tick population. To determine which features in and around residential gardens support or limit the occurrence and abundance of questing I. ricinus ticks, we sampled them in residential gardens in the Braunschweig region that differed in various intrinsic and extrinsic parameters. We recorded the number of questing nymphal and adult ticks on transects, and by using mixed-effects generalized linear regression models, we related their occurrence and abundance to garden characteristics, meteorological covariates, and landscape features in the vicinity. We detected questing I. ricinus ticks in about 90% of the 103 surveyed gardens. Our occurrence model (marginal R² = 0.31) predicted the highest probability of questing ticks on transects with hedges or groundcover in gardens, which are located in neighborhoods with large proportions of forest. The abundance of questing ticks was similarly influenced. We conclude that I. ricinus ticks are frequent in residential gardens in Northern Germany and likely associated with intrinsic garden characteristics on a small scale, such as hedges, as well as extrinsic factors on a local scale, such as the proportion of nearby woodland.

KEYWORDS:

• Ixodes ricinus
• ticks
• garden
• hedge
• occurrence and abundance patterns
• urban tick habitats

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Anne-Lisa Bauer who supported us during tick collections. A.-K.S. and B.S. acknowledge funding by the program ‘Science for Sustainable Development’ of the Volkswagen Foundation and the Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony (metapolis, grant no. ZN3121). Open access funding was enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/20008686.2023.2207878.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Volkswagen Foundation and the Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony [ZN3121].