Fig. 3

Seasonal variations in abundance. Three panels are shown for each monitored herd/site with the tick taxa listed as follows: Hyalomma spp (H spp), A. variegatum (A v), Rhipicephalus spp (R spp), R. annulatus (R a), R. decoloratus (R d), R. microplus (R m) and R. geygyi (R g). The first panel illustrates the variation in abundance during the 12 months of the survey (one rectangle for each month; the first sampling month being February 2012 in areas #1 and #2, April 2012 in area #3 and May 2012 in area #4), color-coded as follows: white, absence (empty rectangle) or sporadic (rectangle with an “x”) distribution; light grey, low abundance; dark grey, medium abundance; and black, high abundance of the taxon (see Table 2). The second panel refers to the correlations computed between each possible pair of tick taxa (same ranking order of the taxa). The third panel shows the correlation between the temporal distribution of a taxon and the monthly rainfall (first column) or the monthly temperature (second column). Significant correlations are in green (positive) or in red (negative)