112521 20230914083433.0 doi 10.1080/20008686.2022.2025647 sideral 128117 ART-2022-128117 eng Estrada-Peña, A. Universidad de Zaragoza (orcid)0000-0001-7483-046X Is composition of vertebrates an indicator of the prevalence of tick-borne pathogens? 2022 Access copy available to the general public Unrestricted Communities of vertebrates tend to appear together under similar ranges of environmental features. This study explores whether an explicit combination of vertebrates and their contact rates with a tick vector might constitute an indicator of the prevalence of a pathogen in the quest for ticks at the western Palearctic scale. We asked how ‘indicator’ communities could be ‘markers’ of the actual infection rates of the tick in the field of two species of Borrelia (a bacterium transmitted by the tick Ixodes ricinus). We approached an unsupervised classification of the territory to obtain clusters on the grounds of abundance of each vertebrate and contact rates with the tick. Statistical models based on Neural Networks, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, and AdaBoost were detect the best correlation between communities’ composition and the prevalence of Borrelia afzelii and Borrelia gariniii in questing ticks. Both Gradient Boosting and AdaBoost produced the best results, predicting tick infection rates from the indicator communities. A ranking algorithm demonstrated that the prevalence of these bacteria in the tick is correlated with indicator communities of vertebrates on sites selected as a proof-of-concept. We acknowledge that our findings are supported by statistical outcomes, but they provide consistency for a framework that should be deeper explored at the large scale. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/DGA/A16-20R info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess by-nc http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/es/ 0.707 2022 Environmental Science (miscellaneous) 2022 Q2 Epidemiology 2022 Q3 9.6 2022 info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion Fernández-Ruiz, N. Universidad de Zaragoza 1009 773 Universidad de Zaragoza Dpto. Patología Animal Área Sanidad Animal 12, 1 (2022), 202564 [17 pp] Infection Ecology and Epidemiology 2000-8686 12413445 http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/112521/files/texto_completo.pdf Versión publicada 998363 http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/112521/files/texto_completo.jpg?subformat=icon icon Versión publicada oai:zaguan.unizar.es:112521 articulos driver 2023-09-13-12:14:44 ARTICLE