## 1 Introduction  
The tick-borne Lyme disease has become the most common vector-borne disease in the USA. During each year of the last decade, an average of more than 200,000 Lyme disease cases were reported according to the statistics in recent years [1]. The annual cost for tick-borne disease testing alone is estimated to be approximately 500 million USD [2]. The Northeastern US has been a hotspot for Lyme disease, especially Connecticut and New York in the past and Pennsylvania and Maryland in recent years [3]. The agent causing Lyme disease is _Borrelia burgdorferi_ sensu static (hereafter, _B. burgdorferi_), a spirochete bacterium, and occasionally, _Borrelia mayoniti_. The primary vector of these bacteria is _Ixodes scapularis_ (hereafter, _I. scapularis_), commonly known as the blacklegged tick or deer tick in the USA. _B. burgdorferi_ can be transferred to a human when an infected blacklegged tick feeds on blood meals from the person [4, 5]. _I. scapularis_ or the blacklegged tick is a member of the _Ixodidae_ family of hard-bodied ticks, consisting of over 700 species globally [6]. The blacklegged tick is native to eastern, northeastern, and central-north US [7, 8, 9, 10, 11]. During a two-year life cycle, it consumes three blood meals, and its questione activity--that is, seeking a vertebrate host to feed itself--varies with its developmental stages [12]. First, after hatching in the early summer, larval black-legged ticks seek and feed on small mammals such as white-footed mice and chipmunks for approximately four days and then molt to nymph. These mammals are natural reservoirs for _B. burgdorferi_, and the tick may become infected when it feeds on them. Second, nymphal ticks overwinter on the ground and quest again in the late spring and early summer of the next year. Normally, they stay poised on the surface of grass or shrub before they attach to passing hosts that brush against the surface. These nymphs then feed on such small hosts for 4-6 days and mature to adults in 4-5 weeks. The infected ticks could pass _B. burgdorferi_ to those hosts. Afterward, adult ticks target large mammals such as white-tailed deer and dogs, and the engorged female ticks lay eggs after mating before the winter [13; 14]. Note that in some high latitude areas such as southeastern Canada where the spring and summer are relatively short, black-legged ticks may have prolonged life spans if they fail to feed or molt before winter [15; 16]. Although vertebrate hosts play a critical role in their lifecycles, ticks such as black-legged ticks in the US and _Ixodes ricinus_ (the sheep ticks) in Europe spend more than 90% of their lifetime off the host [17; 18; 19]. Being cold-blooded, ticks are highly susceptible to environmental stressors, owing to their conservative physiology. The direct linkage between the environment and ticks, as well as the indirect linkage via hosts, is crucial for understanding the complexity of the tick ecology and for modeling the abundance, mortality, and host-seeking activity of the local tick population [20]. The existing studies on tick ecology are mostly in controlled or semi-controlled lab settings or in the natural environments at macro scales, with some notable exceptions [21]. Researchers have examined how ticks respond to temperature and humidity within controlled environments [22; 23; 24; 25]. Additionally, the influence of land cover and vegetation types on ticks was also studied in semi-controlled or natural settings. In uncontrolled natural environments, most of the published studies focus on the relationship between environmental factors and tick population at macro geographic scales [26; 27; 28]. More specifically, ambient temperature is found nonlinearly and positively related to the rates of development and host-seeking activity of blacklegged ticks when it is between the upper (\(\sim\)30 \({}^{\circ}\)C) and lower (\(\sim\)0 \({}^{\circ}\)C) thresholds for tick survival [22; 24; 25].