One Health surveillance and management of tick-borne disease threats in a changing environment
OpTick investigates how landscape change, farm management, climate, and host ecology affect tick-borne disease exposure for livestock and people on UK farms.
About the project
OpTick is focused on understanding and mitigating the changing burden and impacts of tick-borne diseases in UK farmland.
The project brings together ecology, epidemiology, economics, public and animal health, and social science to support surveillance tools, risk guidance, and management strategies for emerging and endemic tick-borne disease threats.
Project details
- Project lead(s)
- Dr Bethan Purse and Dr Caroline Louise Millins
- Lead organisation
- UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
- Award value
- £1,053,877
- Period
- March 2023 to December 2026
People and organisations
Team members
- Bethan PursePrincipal Investigator
- Caroline Louise MillinsPrincipal Investigator
- Jolyon MedlockCo-Investigator
- Nicholas JohnsonCo-Investigator
- Festus AsaagaCo-Investigator
- Jonathan RushtonCo-Investigator
- Kayleigh HansfordResearcher Co-Investigator
- Maya HoldingResearcher Co-Investigator
- Richard HassallResearcher Co-Investigator
Participating organisations
- UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
- University of Liverpool
- UK Health Security Agency
- Animal and Plant Health Agency
- Moredun Research Institute
Research focus
- Farm landscapes
- Livestock tick-borne disease
- Risk guidance
- Co-production
How this connects to VBD Hub
OpTick is expected to produce field evidence, risk guidance, stakeholder outputs, and modelling frameworks relevant to VBD Hub indexing and reuse.
VBD Hub was not directly part of these research consortia. It was funded as follow-on shared infrastructure to support discovery, documentation, and reuse of outputs across the wider UK One Health vector-borne disease community.