Abstract
While tick-borne zoonoses, such as Lyme disease and tick-borne encephalitis, present an increasing global concern, knowledge of their vectors’ distribution remains limited, especially for China. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive dataset of known tick species and their distributions in China, derived from peer-reviewed literature published between 1960 and 2017. We searched for journal articles, conference papers and degree thesis published in both English and Chinese, extracted geographic information associated with tick occurrence, and applied quality-control procedures to remove duplicates and ensure accuracy. The dataset contains 5731 records of geo-referenced occurrences for 123 tick species distributed over 1141 locations distinguished at four levels of scale i.e., provincial, prefectural, county, and township and finer. The most frequently reported tick species include Haemaphysalis longicornis, Dermacentor silvarum, Ixodes persulcatus, Haemaphysalis conicinna, Rhipicephalus microplus, and Rhipicephalus sanguineus sensu lato. The geographical dataset provides an improved map of where ticks inhabit China and can be used for a variety of spatial analyses of ticks and the risk of zoonoses they transmit.
Highlights
Background & SummaryTicks are parasites distributed widely across the world
10% of the currently known 867 tick species worldwide are reported as vectors of these pathogens[4,5]
According to Wu et al.[12, 119] species of ticks have been found in China by 2013, accounting for about 13.7% of the total tick species identified over the world
Summary
Background & SummaryTicks are parasites distributed widely across the world. They are vectors of pathogens of many human and animal infectious diseases of global importance, including Lyme disease (LD), tick-borne encephalitis, haemorrhagic fever, tick-borne macular fever, Q-fever, Babesiosis, tick paralysis, etc.[1,2,3]. The literature on ticks in China mainly focuses on reporting the notification of ticks species in particular locations and/or tick-borne pathogens, studies providing a comprehensive and systematic description of geographic distribution and diversity of tick species are rare, with Wu et al.[12] and Chen et al.[13] being notable exceptions. As both of these studies were published five years ago (i.e. in 2010 and 2013, respectively) and focused on a coarse province-level, there is a need to update this information with most up-to-date records and their geo-locations at finer geographic scales.
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