Northward advance of the lone star tick's range, 2015 to…
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Northward advance of the lone star tick's range, 2015 to 2026
Data: lone star tick (Amblyomma americanum) and all-hard-tick (Ixodidae) occurrence records from GBIF, which includes research-grade iNaturalist citizen-science observations, 2015 to 2026. CDC county establishment data used for validation.
Tools: Python (pandas, pygbif, Uber H3 for the hex grid), matplotlib and contextily for the animation over a CARTO basemap. Interactive version built with deck.gl .
Why "adjusted": raw sighting counts mostly track where people look, not where ticks are, because citizen-science reporting has exploded. So instead of counting, each hexagon shows the share of local tick sightings that were lone star (lone star divided by all hard ticks), which cancels out observer effort. The red line is the northern edge of the range, taken as the 95th-percentile latitude of cells with real lone star signal so a single stray tick cannot distort it. It moves about 66 km north over the decade.
Live interactive map and full method: https://github.com/ahedy7/lone-star-tick-spread/tree/master
#education
source
Data: lone star tick (Amblyomma americanum) and all-hard-tick (Ixodidae) occurrence records from GBIF, which includes research-grade iNaturalist citizen-science observations, 2015 to 2026. CDC county establishment data used for validation.
Tools: Python (pandas, pygbif, Uber H3 for the hex grid), matplotlib and contextily for the animation over a CARTO basemap. Interactive version built with deck.gl .
Why "adjusted": raw sighting counts mostly track where people look, not where ticks are, because citizen-science reporting has exploded. So instead of counting, each hexagon shows the share of local tick sightings that were lone star (lone star divided by all hard ticks), which cancels out observer effort. The red line is the northern edge of the range, taken as the 95th-percentile latitude of cells with real lone star signal so a single stray tick cannot distort it. It moves about 66 km north over the decade.
Live interactive map and full method: https://github.com/ahedy7/lone-star-tick-spread/tree/master
#education
source
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