Ticks jump in a warmer world: Global distribution shifts of main pathogenic ticks are associated with future climate change.

In recent decades, the threats of ticks and tick-borne diseases (TBDs) increased extensively with environmental change, urbanization, and rapidly changing interactions between human and animals. However, large-scale distribution of tick and TBD risks as well as their relationship with environmental change remain inadequately unclear. Here, we first proposed a "tick-pathogen-habitat-human" model to project the global potential distribution of main pathogenic ticks using a total of 70,714 occurrence records. Meanwhile, the effects of ecological factors and socio-economic factors driving the distribution pattern were evaluated. Based on this, the risk distribution of TBDs was projected by large-scale "tick-pathogen-disease" analysis. Furthermore, the distribution shifts of tick suitability were projected under different shared socio-economic pathways in the future. Our findings demonstrate that warm temperate countries (e.g., the United States, China and European countries) in the Northern Hemisphere represent significant high risk regions for ticks and TBDs. Specifically, solar radiation of January emerges as the main decisive factor determining the risk distribution pattern. Future shifts of tick suitability showed decrease trend under low greenhouse gas emission scenarios but increase trend under high scenarios. These suitability shifts were significantly correlated with future temperature- (9 species) and precipitation- (19 species) related factors. Collectively, in this study we first shaped the global risk distribution of main ticks and TBDs as well as tick suitability shifts correlated with future global climate change, which will provide helpful references for disease prevention and administration. The methods proposed here will also shed light on other emerging and recurrent zoonotic diseases (e.g., COVID-19, monkeypox) in the future.