It is also essential to expertly curate the compiled records to avoid misidentification or compilation of records that are incorrectly reported. There is a need to understand which physical and biological key factors determine the geographical ranges of different tick species. The only thoughtful efforts to compile tick distribution were made through the former web site of the European Union-funded and concerted action, International Consortium of Ticks and Tick-Borne Diseases (ICTTD), that hosted tabular data for more than 30,000 records of ticks in the world, and the compilation by Cumming ( 1999) which focused on the Afrotropical region. In order to be useful in public health and veterinary medicine, the study of the geographical distribution of ticks requires centralization of published reports. These tools can effectively be applied to reduce the limitations of tick collections and reports, and make available the information for researchers. A new suite of tools, based on biodiversity informatics, as well as resources summarizing environmental and climate information are being increasingly used to address the relationships of living beings with their surrounding environment (Flemons et al. After publication, data from newly collected material (frequently inspired by a piece of research) often cannot be incorporated into the collective understanding. In the publication process, the link to the underlying primary data is usually broken. As a result, the investments that have been made in acquiring, processing, and storing the specimens and their data often provide little in scientific knowledge. Although these data are nominally accessible to researchers, for all practical purposes they are unavailable to the general community. Thus, they have the potential to serve as baseline from which to document, among other things, the natural occurrence of ticks as currently reported. These data collectively document much of what is known about the diversity, geographic distribution, and phenology of ticks around the world. Each specimen bears at least in theory one label on which the metadata for that specimen are recorded. The world’s major tick collections house hundreds of thousands of specimens. We stressed the importance of building reliable collections of ticks with specific references as to collection point, host and date of capture. However, categorical descriptors of the habitat were less effective. A descriptive analysis of the data revealed that a principal components reduction of the environmental (temperature and NDVI) variables described the distribution of the species in the target territory.
We also attached categorical descriptors of the habitat: a standard classification of land biomes and an ad hoc classification of the target territory from remotely sensed temperature and NDVI data. We attached to every record a coherent set of quantitative descriptors for the site of reporting, namely gridded interpolated monthly climate and remotely sensed data on vegetation (NDVI). The lack of homogeneity of the references and potential pitfalls in the compilation were addressed to create a digital data set of the records of the ticks. marginatus accounting for 7.1 and 8.1 % of records, respectively. Ixodes ricinus accounted for 44.3 % of total records, with H. Almost 42 % of published references are not adequately referenced (and not included in the data set), host is reported for only 61 % of records and a reference to time of collection is missed for 84 % of published records. A total of 10,280 records was included in the data set. We focused on tick species of importance to human and animal health, in particular: Ixodes ricinus, Dermacentor marginatus, D. Records from some curated collections were included. The literature search was filtered by the tick’s species name and an unambiguous reference to the point of capture. We compiled information on the distribution of ticks in the western Palearctic (11°W, 45☎ 29°N, 71°N), published during 1970–2010.
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