Accounting for missing ticks: Use (or lack thereof) of hierarchical models in tick ecology studies

Ixodid (hard) ticks play important ecosystem roles and have significant impacts on animal and human health via tick-borne diseases and physiological stress from parasitism. Tick occurrence, abundance, behavior, and key life-history traits are highly influenced by host availability, weather, microclimate, and landscape features. As such, changes in the environment can have profound impacts on ticks, their hosts, and the spread of diseases. Researchers interested in enumerating questing ticks attempt to integrate this heterogeneity by conducting replicate sampling bouts spread over the tick questing period as common field methods notoriously underestimate ticks. However, it is unclear how (or if) tick studies account for this heterogeneity in the modeling process. This step is critical as unaccounted variance in detection can lead to biased estimates of occurrence and abundance. We performed a descriptive review to evaluate the extent to which studies account for the detection process whi..., Methods
To illustrate the problems that arise from not accounting for the detection process while estimating tick abundance, we performed two simulations that mirrored tick dragging studies and used common statistical frameworks for modeling tick data. For both simulations, we chose 5 temporal replicate surveys of 100 plots and specified a positive relationship of temperature on abundance and detection probability; average abundance (λ) was arbitrarily set to 20 ticks. Our choice of replicate surveys is a common field design for studying ticks (Dobson, 2013), and environmental factors such as temperature influence tick abundance and activity (Gilbert, 2021; Klarenberg and Wisely, 2019) and are often used to model tick abundance. For our first simulation, we specified low detection probability (ρ = 0.2) as tick dragging surveys often only collect ~10–20% of questing ticks (Drew and Samuel, 1985; Nyrhilä et al., 2020). We assumed perfect detection (ρ = 1) for our second simulation, meanin..., , # Data from: Accounting for missing ticks: Use (or lack thereof) of hierarchical models in tick ecology studies

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.tmpg4f561](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.tmpg4f561)

Ixodid (hard) ticks play important ecosystem roles and have significant impacts on animal and human health via tick-borne diseases and physiological stress from parasitism. Tick occurrence, abundance, behavior, and key life-history traits are highly influenced by host availability, weather, microclimate, and landscape features. As such, changes in the environment can have profound impacts on ticks, their hosts, and the spread of diseases. Researchers interested in enumerating questing ticks attempt to integrate this heterogeneity by conducting replicate sampling bouts spread over the tick questing period as common field methods notoriously underestimate ticks. However, it is unclear how (or if) tick studies account for this heterogeneity in the modeling process. This step is critical as unacco...