The rising prevalence of tick-borne diseases in humans in recent decades has called attention to the need for more information on geographic risk for public health planning. Species distribution models (SDMs) are an increasingly utilized method of constructing potential geographic ranges. There are many knowledge gaps in our understanding of risk of exposure to tick-borne pathogens, particularly for those in the rickettsial group. Here, we conducted a systematic scoping review of the SDM literature for rickettsial pathogens and tick vectors in the genus Amblyomma. Of the 174 reviewed articles, only 24 studies used SDMs to estimate the potential extent of vector and/or pathogen ranges. The majority of studies (79%) estimated only tick distributions using vector presence as a proxy for pathogen exposure. Studies were conducted at different scales and across multiple continents. Few studies undertook original data collection, and SDMs were mostly built with presence-only datasets from public database or surveillance sources. The reliance on existing data sources, using ticks as a proxy for disease risk, may simply reflect a lag in new data acquisition and a thorough understanding of the tick-pathogen ecology involved.

中文翻译：

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对选定的短眼蜱和立克次氏体病原体的分布模型进行范围审查


近几十年来，人类蜱传疾病的患病率不断上升，引起人们的注意，需要更多有关公共卫生规划地理风险的信息。物种分布模型（SDM）是一种越来越多地用于构建潜在地理范围的方法。我们对接触蜱传病原体的风险的理解存在许多知识差距，特别是对于立克次体群体的病原体。在这里，我们对 Amblyomma 属立克次体病原体和蜱媒介的 SDM 文献进行了系统范围审查。在 174 篇综述文章中，只有 24 篇研究使用 SDM 来估计媒介和/或病原体范围的潜在范围。大多数研究 (79%) 仅使用媒介存在作为病原体暴露的代理来估计蜱分布。研究是在不同规模和跨越多个大陆进行的。很少有研究进行原始数据收集，并且 SDM 大多是使用来自公共数据库或监视源的仅存在数据集构建的。对现有数据源的依赖，使用蜱作为疾病风险的代表，可能只是反映了新数据采集和对所涉及的蜱病原体生态学的透彻理解的滞后。