Project: NEON ticks

[brettmelbourne]

Tick abundance and pathogens, phenocam data.

[bkhobart]

Interested in some facets of this project. Lots of angles and data to bring in

[mech3132]

Interested! Esp interested in learning how to model parasite load and variability across hosts

[WynneMoss]

Also into working on this dataset! Barfing out some ideas that were mentioned last week:

1. building models to forecast tick abundances over time (focusing on NEON's temporal data)
2. integrating tick abundances + their parasite prevalence to predict disease risk (perhaps in response to other NEON data like vegetation (Max mentioned phenocam data here), rodent abundance, weather, etc)
3. phenological synchrony between tick abundance (or infected tick abundance?) and other communities (rodents, plants,etc) -- are there certain conditions favoring disease transmission?
4. analyses more in the realm of community ecology (not sure how forecasting applies here)- looking at diversity of tick parasite communities in relation to season, location, other levels of diversity. Network analyses of tick and parasite communities, maybe integrating rodent data as well
5. looking at density-dependence of various pathogens, linking to rodent or tick abundances

[scelmendorf]

Adding in a few relevant papers since this one seems to be gaining traction:
https://dx.doi.org/10.3390%2Finsects10100321 (Evaluation of NEON Data to Model Spatio-Temporal Tick Dynamics in Florida)
https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.1271 (Tick‐, mosquito‐, and rodent‐borne parasite sampling designs for the National Ecological Observatory Network)

[matthewbitters]

Also interested. Thanks for the papers, Sarah!

[scelmendorf]

Also relevant - if you haven't already worked this out most of the 'OS' products (e.g. stuff that is not sensors or aop) come with a user guide that gives a brief description of the parent-child relationships (subsetting), spatial and temporal frequency.
http://data.neonscience.org/api/v0/documents/NEON_tck_userGuide_vA
I think it should also come with your data if you pick the 'expanded' option rather than 'basic' in your download.

[bkhobart]

Link below to an Ostfeld & Keesing article with a good primer on Lyme/tick ecology. More detailed pubs to follow

https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1046/j.1523-1739.2000.99014.x