Manage the landscape
During 2024, we hope to enlist families in the Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls area to allow us to examine how well tick treatments work alone or in combination with mosquito barrier treatments.
During 2023, we worked in Eau Claire with 65 families to examine how well lawn edge treatments for mosquitoes and ticks work to suppress nymphal ticks in the backyard. We found that one treatment provided by commercial pest management technicians reduced the nymphal ticks by 80-90% in the treated zone next to the woods, where the risk is highest. The impact persisted for 4 weeks after the treatment. We also found that about half of the homes that received the treatments didn’t produce any ticks in the area we sampled.
During 2019, we worked with two communities in Wisconsin to test a lawn treatment that many people use to control grubs to see if it was also effective in reducing deer ticks. We treated a narrow strip between the yards and adjacent woods in May and then measured tick density at the edge of the woods and a few feet into the yards for up to 4 weeks after treatment (through the peak of the nymphal season). The treatment resulted in a high level of reduction of nymphal ticks in the lawn areas in comparison with yards that received only a water treatment. The product is available as a do-it-yourself treatment from many home repair stores.
More information about treating the area between woods and yard with a pesticide that kills ticks.