Woodland expansion and deer management shape tick abundance and Lyme disease hazard

The largest land use change in Europe is woodland expansion, through planting and natural regeneration. Unforeseen consequences of this could include changes in environmental hazards, such as exposure to parasites and pathogens.
Tick-borne Lyme disease is the most prevalent tick-borne disease in the northern hemisphere and is often associated with woodlands. Therefore, to inform the planning and management of expanding woodlands, we test how land covers that reflect different types and stages of the woodland expansion process, along with their deer management, impact tick densities and Lyme disease hazard (density of infected nymphs). We also test whether differences in rodent abundance play a mechanistic role in explaining differences in Lyme disease hazard.
In Northwest Scotland, a touristic area undergoing woodland expansion, we recorded deer management, rodent densities, Ixodes ricinus nymph densities, pathogen prevalence and Lyme disease hazard between: open moorland, young pine an..., We gathered data on deer management, rodent abundance, questing I. ricinus nymph density, B. burgdorferi s.l prevalence and Lyme disease hazard in Wester Ross, northwest Scotland 2018 - 2020 in plots over five land cover types: (1) heather/grass moorland (dominated by Erica and Calluna species); (2) young Scots pine aged 13 to 30 years old; and (3) mature (at least 60 years old) Scots pine woodland; (4) deciduous birch woodland (Betula spp.) and (5) commercial Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) plantations.
Information on deer management (culling, exclusion fencing, or both) for all 40 plots (8 plots from each land cover type) was gained from the landowner or manager.
We collected data on Ixodes ricinus nymph density at all plots in 2018 by the standard blanket drag transect method: a 1m x 1m square of blanket was dragged along the ground for 10m and all ticks counted, collected and stored in 1.5ml Eppendorf tubes containing 70% ethanol to await pathogen identification. Each 10 m2 transect..., , # Woodland expansion and deer management shape tick abundance and Lyme disease hazard

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.jh9w0vtn0](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.jh9w0vtn0)

## Description of the data and file structure

You can open the .xls file in microsoft Excel. The first tab includes a key for all the data

so you can see what each column is. Tab number 2 is the dataset used for the tick density and nymphal infection prevalence models and the third

tab is the dataset used the density of infected nymphs, adding a value of one in a pine habitat so the models could run (see methods for details).

If you need the R script, please let me know.

Sara

### Files and variables

Cells with \"NA\" in the dataset are cells for which no data were collected/available. For instance, NAs in the column \"rodentsper100trapnights19\" indicates that rodent trapping was not done for this specific site/year. NAs in the prevalence column indicates that no ticks were tested as fewer than 50 nymphs were collec...