## 2 Materials and Methods
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l l l} \hline
**Study Area** & **Land Cover** & **Wildlife** \\ \hline _Rockefeller Park Preserve_ (_RPP_), Westchester County,_ & Primarily covered by hardwood forest. & _RPP_ supports 202 species of resident and migratory birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals (e.g., white tailed deer, eastern grey squirrel). \\ \hline _Free Island National Sushore_ (_FINS_), _Suffolk County,_ & \
\begin{tabular}{l} Main land cover includes beaches, sand dunes, \\ interdune scrub, maritime forest, and wetland \\ habitats. The severe environment only \\ supports a few plant species (e.g., beach \\ grasslands, pitch pine woodlands, bearberry \\ dwarf scrubs). \\ \end{tabular} &
\begin{tabular}{l} In addition to a number of terrestrial mammal \\ species (e.g., white tailed deer, red fox, eastern \\ potential rabbits, white footed mouse) \\ identified on the seashorc, it is home to a wide variety of species including migratory birds, marine mammals, and reptiles. \\ \end{tabular} \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: _Cont._  
Figure 1: Study area and sampling sites: (**A**) Rockefeller Park Preserve, RPP; (**B**) Caumsett State Park, CSP; (**C**) Connetquot River State Park, CRSP; (**D**) Fire Island National Seashore, FINS. All four parks are near New York City and in suburban areas. The black dots are the locations of the 5 m by 5 m sampling sites where questione blacklegged ticks were collected. To collect black-legged ticks, each team member swept a cloth flag (\(\sim\)0.75 m \(\times\) 1 m) attached to a pole (1 m) over the ground, foliage, shrubs, and fallen trees within the boundary of a sampling site. Since black-legged ticks may not be the only tick species encountered (e.g., _Amblyomma americanum_, the lone star ticks, were frequently observed during field works), the ticks attached to the flag were first identified, and only black-legged ticks were collected and counted. Although widely employed, such a \"cloth-lure\" technique is known to have several limitations such as being ineffective on non-questing ticks, restricted by densely wooded areas, time consuming, and labor intensive [48; 49]. The accuracy of estimating the abundance of black-legged ticks, therefore, may vary with respect to the thoroughness of tick sampling in a study area [50]. The flagging sampling method, however, can systematically reflect the quantity of actively question ticks [43; 44; 51; 52]. As we applied the same protocol to the flagging sampling method across the four parks, our data are consistent across these sites over time. The systematic errors caused by the flagging method would be unlikely to cause significant bias in our analysis and modeling because the ratios of counted question black-legged ticks to actual questing ticks were roughly equal for all samples. To model the numbers of questing ticks against environmental factors, a group of variables, including temperature, humidity, vegetation cover, elevation, solar radiation, and landscape fragmentation, were identified based on the literature, prior to our fieldwork. Figure 2: Landscapes of the Four New York City Suburban Parks. The parks represent the typical landscapes in suburban New York with various levels of fragmentation, diverse land-cover types, and different vegetation compositions. Temperature is a well-known factor in tick ecology. Although precipitation is often used as a variable to represent moisture, studies indicate that relative humidity performs better in depicting the microclimate of tick habitats, especially in micro-scale studies [42]. Within each sampling site, both temperature and relative humidity were measured at three random spots with an \"Extech 45158 Anemometer & Humidity Meter\", held approximately 40 cm above the ground to match the average question heights of blacklegged ticks. These values were averaged for the site.