Identification of Climate Conditions Restricting the Distribution of the Taiga Tick Ixodes Persulcatus on the Territory
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Identification of Climate Conditions Restricting the Distribution of the Taiga Tick Ixodes Persulcatus on the Territory of Russia and in Neighboring Countries I. O. Popova,b,* and E. N. Popovab,** Presented by Academician V. M. Kotlyakov February 16, 2020 Received February 17, 2020; revised May 4, 2020; accepted May 6, 2020
Abstract—Identification of climate conditions that determine the distribution of species is an important stage in modeling their habitats. Based on the data of the actual distribution of the taiga tick Ixodes persulcatus, a vector of a number of dangerous diseases of humans and animals, as well as on an analysis of the literature, the climate factors limiting its distribution are revealed. By iterating over the grid of the boundary values of these factors, the limiting climate conditions that form the habitat of this tick have been refined. Keywords: ixodid ticks, habitat modeling, species distribution DOI: 10.1134/S1028334X20070144
INTRODUCTION The taiga tick Ixodes persulcatus Schulze, 1930 is a blood-sucking ectoparasite of a broad range of vertebrata species. The importance of studying it is determined by the fact that it is a vector of a number of dangerous diseases of humans and animals, such as tickborne encephalitis, tick-borne borrelioses (Lyme disease), tularemia, babesiosis, etc. [1]. The habitat of the taiga tick is very large. It is primarily located on the territory of the Russian Federation. There are also zones of distribution in southern Finland, in northeastern China, in Mongolia and North Korea, and on the northern slopes of Tien Shan. Individual sites are found in Transcarpathia, Belarus, and the Baltic States [1–4]. The climate changes that are occurring at present and that will evidently occur in the near future affect the habitats of different organisms, including ixodid ticks. Therefore, a model evaluation of the past and future climatogenic changes in its habitats becomes an urgent problem. By now a set of different, including complicated and sophisticated, methods for species distribution modeling has been developed [5, 6]. Neva Izrael
Institute of the Global Climate and Ecology, Moscow, 107258 Russia b Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 119017 Russia *e-mail: [email protected] **e-mail: [email protected]
ertheless, simple algorithms have still been used. One such simple method is the discovery of limit values of climatic factors, the predictors limiting the possibility of the stable existence of the populations of the species under study. The model obtained this way can be considered as a simple binary decision tree, each node of which contains one condition, and one of the branches of each node corresponding to nonfulfillment of the condition does not branch any further and ends with a final leaf that identifies a negative class (“beyond the habitat”). This study used this approach for identification of the climatic conditions that determine the distribution of the taiga tick I. persulcatus on the territory of Russia and in adjac
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