Fig. 1

Tick life-cycle with particular emphasis on the driver groups studied here and where they act in the life-cycle. After attachment, ticks are transported with their host. Landscape and habitat characteristics then drive host and tick ecology. Greyed out driver groups (and arrows) are important for the sake of completeness, they are however not included in our analysis. They include not only mechanistic aspects such as ‘tick-host dwell time’ or ‘grooming’, but also molecular effects between ticks, the bacteria and hosts such as ‘tick host species traits’ or ‘immunity’)