Table 2.

Ranking of the top ten most important features (out of 101) for the selected RF model

Position	Feature	Importance
1	ev-365	15
2	rh-30	11
3	tmax-365	7
4	prec-90	4
5	prec-3	4
6	ev-90	3
7	rh-365	3
8	tmin-365	2
9	prec-365	2
10	tmax-90	2

The sum of the feature importance for all features provided by RF equals to 1, but to ease the interpretation of results we multiplied it by a hundred to have natural numbers. As seen, features involving atmospheric water levels (i.e. evapotranspiration and relative humidity) are found to be important to predict tick activity, since they appear several times in the current ranking