Automated tick classification using deep learning and its associated challenges in citizen science

Abstract

Abstract Lyme borreliosis and tick-borne encephalitis significantly impact public health in Europe, transmitted primarily by endemic tick species. The recent introduction of exotic tick species into northern Europe via migratory birds, imported animals, and travelers highlights the urgent need for rapid detection and accurate species identification. To address this, the Swedish Veterinary Agency launched a citizen science initiative, resulting in the submission of over 15,000 tick images spanning seven species. We developed, trained, and evaluated deep learning models incorporating image analysis, object detection, and transfer learning to support automated tick classification. The EfficientNetV2M model achieved a macro recall of 0.60 and a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.55 on out-of-distribution, citizen-submitted data. These results demonstrate the feasibility of integrating AI with citizen science for large-scale tick monitoring while also highlighting challenges related to class imbalance, species similarity, and morphological variability. Rather than robust species-level classification, our framework serves as a proof of concept for infrastructure that supports scalable and adaptive tick surveillance. This work lays the groundwork for future AI-driven systems in One Health contexts, extendable to other arthropod vectors and emerging public health threats.