Tejon Ranch Exclosure Experiment - Tick (family Ixodidae: subclass Acari) and Small Vertebrate Responses

Large-bodied wild ungulates are declining worldwide, while domestic livestock continue to increase in abundance. Such changes in large herbivore communities should have strong effects on the control of ticks and tickborne disease as they can indirectly modify habitat and directly serve as final hosts for ticks’ lifecycles. Numerous studies have now linked changing ungulate communities to changes in tick populations and disease risk. However, the effects of changing large herbivore communities are variable across studies, and the effect of climate as a mediating factor of this variation remains poorly understood. Also, studies to date have largely focused on wildlife loss without considering the extent to which livestock additions may alter tick populations, even though livestock replacement of wildlife is the global norm. In this study, we used a large-scale exclosure experiment replicated along a topo-climatic gradient to examine the effects on tick populations of both large herbivore ..., , , ## Data Files

**Tejon_MeanComparisons_Dataset.csv**: contains tick drag data aggregated by *year*, *month*, *site*, *block*, and *plot*. The tick drag data includes a *total* column of all tick species collected and additionally, four columns representing the three tick species collected via drags *deoc* (*Dermacentor occidentalis*), *ipac* (*Ixodes pacificus*), *deva* (*Dermacentor variabilis*), and *other* (for non-identified ticks). Finally, it contains a unique numerical ID for each of the 27 exclosure treatments of TREE, *plotID*.

This data was used in the manuscript's analyses, which investigated the individual and interactive impacts of climate level and herbivore treatment on tick abundance.

**Tejon_MixedModels_Dataset.csv**: in addition to tick drag data, it contains columns liz_estimate and mam_estimates created by the results located in the **tejon_mamliz_popestimates.csv** file detailed below. This data set analyzes climate and herbivore treatment impact on lizard and sma...