There have been articles on remotely sensing malaria mosquito habitat, including some wet marshy areas. Has anyone tried to remotely map deer-tick habitat (e.g. certain shrubs, etc.)?
What kind of habitat do Lime disease carrying ticks prefer? Can their habitat be detected by multispectral/hyperspectral airborne or high-resolution satellite sensors?
Hi Victor, the multispectral sensor can detect general vegetation types (rain forest, cloud forest, dry forest, coniferous forest, oak forest, grassland, scrubs, etc., or water bodies and soil bare), the hyperspectral sensor can discriminate the subtype vegetation (cloud forest with bush, dry forest with columnar cactus, oak forest vs scrubs, etc.)
The habitat can detected with habitat prediction models, is necessary to know the environmental variables where the species modeling, one of them is the type of vegetation, but others such as altitude, temperature, host distribution, are very important. For construction of the models you can use the software: MaxEnt, Gap or Diva Gis, which are free.
I have not worked with deer ticks, but currently collaborate with other researchers to detect Chagas bug habitat, I'm using images landsat 8 (multispectral sensor), and environmental variables. theoretical principle is the same.
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