Impacts of plant invasions on tick-borne disease risk

Abstract Under global change, plant invasions may alter tick-borne disease exposure risk. The direction and magnitude of changes in tick-borne disease risk resulting from invasions remain poorly understood because research has often been species specific or insufficient to quantify the mechanisms of risk. In this Overview, we describe how invasive plant functional traits can mediate microclimates, how tick survival and abundance vary under altered environmental conditions created by invasive plants, and how invasive plants can affect blood meal host activity and pathogen prevalence. These findings are synthesized within a One Health framework that considers climate, landscape, and disturbance to ultimately predict tick-borne disease risk. We then discuss modeling approaches for predicting tick-borne disease risk amid global change and identify research gaps and future directions, including quantification of invader functional traits, assessment of plant invasion effects on tick-borne disease risk, and the potential for plant invasions to facilitate geographic expansions of ticks, hosts, and pathogens.