Data from: Invasion of two tick-borne diseases across New England: harnessing human surveillance data to capture underlying ecological invasion processes

Modelling the spatial spread of vector-borne zoonotic pathogens maintained
in enzootic transmission cycles remains a major challenge. The best
available spatio-temporal data on pathogen spread often take the form of
human disease surveillance data. By applying a classic ecological
approach—occupancy modelling—to an epidemiological question of disease
spread, we used surveillance data to examine the latent ecological
invasion of tick-borne pathogens. Over the last half-century, previously
undescribed tick-borne pathogens including the agents of Lyme disease and
human babesiosis have rapidly spread across the northeast United States.
Despite their epidemiological importance, the mechanisms of tick-borne
pathogen invasion and drivers underlying the distinct invasion
trajectories of the co-vectored pathogens remain unresolved. Our approach
allowed us to estimate the unobserved ecological processes underlying
pathogen spread while accounting for imperfect detection of human cases.
Our model predicts that tick-borne diseases spread in a diffusion-like
manner with occasional long-distance dispersal and that babesiosis spread
exhibits strong dependence on Lyme disease.