Distribución de la especie de garrapata rhipicephlus (boophilus) microplus en bovinos mediante los modelos MaxEnt y GARP en el Ecuador Continental

Abstract

Ticks are ectoparasites considered an important health factor because they can be transmitters of diseases both for their host and for humans. The Rhipicephalus (Boophilus) microplus species, is a tick that fulfills its life cycle in a single host, generally cattle, it can transmit two diseases, babesiosis and anaplasmosis, both causing severe problems in the host. It is widely distributed in tropical and subtropical areas around the world, in warm weather conditions at different altitudes. For the control and prevention of the effects that this species of tick may cause, it is necessary to know the distribution of the species through a fundamental niche model, this was carried out in the continental territory of Ecuador, with the use of the MaxEnt and GARP models. which are algorithms widely used in species distribution models. The results obtained were the fundamental niche models of the tick species Rhipicephalus (Boophilus) microplus, where around 30% of the territory is suitable for the presence of the tick. The variables that most influenced the models were land cover and use, where grasslands, crops and agricultural mosaics were the most representative, the seasonality of precipitation with a coefficient of variation of 89%, indicating a great variation in the precipitations and the annual average temperature of 25°C. The two models were validated and compared through the analysis of the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) and the values of the area under the raven (AUC) thereof, where the MaxEnt algorithm proved to be the most suitable for executing the distribution model. for this species of tick; also, the similarity of both models was found by calculating the similarity index, where the result was 94.5%, indicating that the MaxEnt and GARP models are very similar