An independent project
About TickZone
TickZone gives every town a single, plain tick-risk score for the day, updated every morning. It exists because tick-borne disease is local and seasonal: the difference between a risky afternoon and a quiet one is mostly your own town's weather, habitat, and season. We wanted a calm, sourced number you can check before you head outside, with the reasoning shown, not hidden.
Our commitments
The rules this site runs on
Four commitments. Everything else follows from them.
The score is never influenced by money
TickZone carries no ads. No commercial relationship changes a score, a ranking, or a recommendation, ever. Where the site earns anything at all, it is disclosed right on the page it happens, and it lives entirely outside the score.
Every claim traces to a named public source
The score is built only from public data: U.S. CDC disease and tick surveillance, Open-Meteo weather, ESA WorldCover land cover, and U.S. Census geography. Each page cites the sources it uses, and the methodology shows exactly how they combine.
Honesty about limits
The score is a defensible heuristic, not a validated medical model. It estimates how favorable a day is for tick activity in a place; it cannot tell you whether a specific tick carries disease. Where a question needs a doctor, the guides say so plainly.
Errors get fixed, fast
The health guides are written against published CDC guidance, not reviewed by clinicians, and every page shows the date it was last reviewed. If something on this site is wrong, tell us. We would rather correct a page than defend it.
The full scoring method is public: how the score works →
The forecast
What you get
Each town's score combines local weather, the tick life-stage, local land cover, and county tick-borne-disease rates, plus which tick species are established in the county. It is recomputed every morning from the latest forecast, so it moves with the weather and the season. The underlying disease, species, and land-cover data refresh as the agencies publish, and every page shows when it was last reviewed.
The person
Who makes it
TickZone is an independent project built and maintained by Nathan Burnett, a developer in Massachusetts, in Lyme country, where checking for ticks after a walk is a household habit. It isn't affiliated with any government agency or the data sources it cites. An iOS app with a home-screen widget and daily alerts is in the works; the website stays free.
For press
TickZone publishes a free daily tick-risk score for 32,386 towns across 51 states, built from CDC, Open-Meteo, ESA WorldCover, and U.S. Census data, and carries no advertising. Reporters are welcome to cite the scores and rankings with a link.
County-level data, an interview, or an embeddable map: hello@tickzone.app. We answer quickly during tick season.
Questions, corrections, or a data source we should add? Contact us. We take accuracy seriously and would rather fix something than leave it wrong.