Abstract
Nymphal ticks of Ixodes pacificus, Ixodes scapularis, Ixodes ricinus, and Ixodes persulcatus are primary vectors of Lyme disease, which affects both animal and human health. Understanding their population dynamic is therefore critical for public health risk assessment. Here we present a focused dataset of questing nymph density, comprising 3579 records from 136 publications from 1980 to 2024. The dataset includes three tick species that represent major Lyme disease risk in the Northern Hemisphere. Records were compiled through systematic literature review and preserved original density measurements with their respective units (e.g., nymphs/m², nymphs/100 m²). Each record contains detailed metadata including tick species, geographical coordinates, temporal resolution and collection methods. This resource provides transparent and structured tick surveillance data essential for ecological modelling, disease risk prediction, and public health risk mapping.
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Data availability
The dataset is available at Figshare (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31338913).
Code availability
There was no code produced during the collection and validation of this dataset.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Prof. David R. Coyle (Department of Entomology, University of Wisconsin, United States), Prof. Christina Strube (Institute for Parasitology, University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover, Germany) and Prof. Manisha Kulkarni (the School of Epidemiology and Public Health, University of Ottawa, Canada) for providing original sampling information for some of the tick density. This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 42477465, 42311530697) and Hubei Provincial Natural Science Foundation (No. 2024AFB591). This work benefitted from financial support from Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (F.RS.-FNRS) through funding PDR n°40021383.
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Y.Z. drafted the manuscript with editing and approval of all authors. Y.Z., Y.S. developed data search and abstraction protocols. Y.Z. compiled the data records and data visualization. Y.S., S.O.V. and S.L. performed the technical validation. S.O.V. and S.L. revised the manuscript and provided feedback on data implementation. All authors contributed to literature review and geographic information positioning.
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Zhang, Y., Sun, Y., Wang, J. et al. Geographical dataset of questing nymphal density for three key tick vector species of Lyme disease. Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-07130-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-07130-5
