How Community Science is Helping New York State Monitor Ticks

With a little training, 59 New York citizen scientists collected more than 3,700 ticks from 15 counties over a two-week period in the summer of 2021, greatly expanding the reach of professional tick researchers at the Northeast Regional Center. for Excellence in Vector. -Transmitted diseases (NEVBD). The “New York State Tick Blitz” is now an annual project and a model that tick monitoring programs elsewhere can follow. NEVBD researchers trained volunteers and provided them with a kit of tools and materials, pictured here. (Photo by Nicole Foley)

By Carolyn Bernhardt

Roughly 476,000 Americans are diagnosed and treated for Lyme disease every year, alone. But, in the United States, ticks are spreading at least 16 different diseases to humans. And, for six years, the Northeast has reported the most ER visits of tick bites from any part of the country.

“Right now, public health vector surveillance units are really struggling to monitor these ticks,” says Laura Harrington, Ph.D., professor at the Northeast Regional Center for Excellence in Vector-Borne Diseases at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences in Ithaca, New York. She says strategies such as engaging community scientists can help officials get closer to tracking ticks and the diseases they spread.

The depth and breadth of citizen science

Sampling and testing for ticks may be essential, but it is expensive. Harrington runs a community science project called the “New York State Tick Blitzwhich she says helped solve some of these cost issues. In 2021, the Tick Blitz pilot program set out to engage community volunteers in active tick sampling, educate them about tick-borne diseases, and create a model to leverage community science to help to monitor the distribution of ticks.

Ultimately, the Tick Blitz involved 59 volunteers who sampled 164 sites in 15 counties, collecting a total of 3,759 ticks. Nicole Foley, a master’s student in Harrington’s lab at the time, led the volunteers, providing them with training and materials to perform tick sampling for a two-week period in June 2021. The project was the project of Foley’s thesis and was published in April in the Journal of Medical Entomology.

With a little training, 59 New York citizen scientists collected more than 3,700 ticks from 15 counties over a two-week period in the summer of 2021, greatly expanding the reach of professional tick researchers at the Northeast Regional Center. for Excellence in Vector. -Transmitted diseases. Of the tick specimens found by the volunteers, most were Asian long-horned ticks (Haemaphysalis longicornis, 54 percent of specimens). (Picture by danbarb via iNaturalist, CC BY-NC 4.0)

Foley says one of the main advantages of the community science model of the Tick Blitz was the amount of space they could sample. “We were able to cover 15 counties, and it just couldn’t have happened in a week if it was just me and a seasonal staff member,” she says.

Of the tick specimens found by the volunteers, most were Asian long-horned ticks (Haemaphysalis longicornis54% of specimens), followed by American dog ticks (Variable Dermacentor22 percent)blacklegged ticks (Ixodes scapularis13%) and solitary ticks (Amblyomma americanum11%). They also found Asian long-horned ticks in a county where the species had not previously been identified.

The research team also tested a subset of the collected tick specimens for pathogens. Overall, they found the highest rates of blacklegged tick-borne pathogens, including those that cause Lyme disease (Borrelia burgdorferi), anaplasmosis (Phagocytophilic anaplasma) and babesiosis (Babesia microtis).

The researchers pooled their tick samples for testing to further reduce costs. “With community science, you don’t always get the precision that you might get with sampling by trained personnel,” says Harrington. “But overall hopefully the data signal will hold up to the large sample of collectors we had.”

Some of the tick pools the researchers tested were positive for multiple pathogens, while others were positive for only one or none. However, more than half of the tick pools tested were positive for the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, and smaller percentages were positive for other pathogens. The 13 counties where the team collected ticks showed signs of B. burgdorferi And B. microtis. Almost all counties had positive ticks for A. phagocytophilicand three tick pools were positive for Powassan virus.

Scientists say the identification of new tick species and the finding of high rates of infection in ticks collected by community scientists underscores both the importance of continued tick surveillance efforts and the urgent need for rapid response strategies to mitigate the spread of tick-borne diseases, especially in New York State.

With a little training, 59 New York citizen scientists collected more than 3,700 ticks from 15 counties over a two-week period in the summer of 2021, greatly expanding the reach of professional tick researchers at the Northeast Regional Center. for Excellence in Vector. -Transmitted diseases (NEVBD). The “New York State Tick Blitz” is now an annual project and a model that tick monitoring programs elsewhere can follow. Here, NEVBD entomologist Emily Mader, Ph.D., collects ticks with a rag. (Photo courtesy of the Northeast Regional Center of Excellence in Vector-Borne Diseases)

Engage the community

“The other big goal was to involve the community, and I think that was extremely successful,” says Harrington. Participants completed a survey after the experience and indicated that they would promote it to others. Half of them said they “enjoyed participating in meaningful scientific activities”.

With a little training, 59 New York citizen scientists collected more than 3,700 ticks from 15 counties over a two-week period in the summer of 2021, greatly expanding the reach of professional tick researchers at the Northeast Regional Center. for Excellence in Vector. -Transmitted diseases. The “New York State Tick Blitz” is now an annual project and a model that tick monitoring programs elsewhere can follow. Volunteer Mel Evans, pictured here, participated in 2021. (Photo by Sherrie Evans)

For Harrington, these findings mean that “people felt empowered by the knowledge they gained about ticks and personal protection.” It also means that outreach and education programs like Tick Blitz help raise awareness of tick-borne diseases and the role of community members in tick-monitoring efforts.

Foley says researchers across the country can replicate the Tick Blitz model to collect prevalence data on ticks and tick-borne pathogens. However, she says the approach works better for finding the presence and absence of ticks. For more specific surveys, like phenology, community science can also work, “as long as you train your volunteers in the right protocol.” She also says that repeating the project helps solidify the quality of the data collected: “Doing it once and stopping is not ideal. »

This study was the first Tick Blitz conducted by the team. They also led a second cohort in the summer of 2022 and are now fine-tuning their approach for another cycle this summer.

“One of the big limitations that we recognized [in the 2021 cohort] it’s that we haven’t captured in a quantifiable way what knowledge the participants are gaining,” says Harrington. “We knew they were learning based on their feedback and feedback [via survey], but we did not capture quantitative data. If we had done a before and after knowledge assessment, we would have captured that. »

She says they plan to overlay this step for the summer of 2023 and recommends other groups looking to conduct a similar study do the same. The team also plans to work with select New York State parks this summer to expand its reach of participants and help provide the state with tick data from key ecosystems.

“I think a lot of people in the general public don’t realize how serious the situation is with respect to the lack of funding to support tick surveillance,” Harrington says. “And community science is definitely a tool that can help.”

Carolyn Bernhardt, MAis a freelance scientific writer and editor based in Portland, Oregon. E-mail: [email protected].

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