The dependence of urban tick and Lyme disease hazards on the hinterlands

Gandy, Sara L. and Hall, Jessica L. and Plahe, Grace and Watkinson, Kirsty and Johnson, David and Birtles, Richard J. and Gilbert, Lucy (2025) The dependence of urban tick and Lyme disease hazards on the hinterlands. Nature Cities, 2 (10). pp. 948-957. ISSN 2731-9997

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Abstract

Within- and between-city contexts and interactions shape our experiences of city life. However, a gap in understanding is how the wider landscape context of cities and the interactions with hinterlands influence urban ecology and health hazards. Using a meta-ecosystem framework, we fill this gap for the tick-borne Lyme disease ecological system by comparing the tick and Lyme disease hazards of urban and hinterland sites for 16 UK cities. We discover that the environmental hazards of ticks and Lyme disease of urban greenspaces are two- and threefold lower, respectively, than those of hinterland woodlands. Crucially, urban tick and Lyme disease hazards are shaped by tick abundance and the landcover (woodland and built-up) of hinterlands, but not of cities themselves. This highlights how rural–urban interactions form meta-ecosystems, and urban eco-epidemiology can depend on the characteristics of the surrounding rural landscape. Therefore, to better understand urban ecological processes and to mitigate disease risk in cities, it may be necessary to consider environmental factors in the hinterland such as landcover and disease hazard outside cities.