Roman McKay crouches at the edge of a trail in Ottawa’s Greenbelt, test tube in hand, carefully placing a blacklegged tick onto a blade of grass. It’s a small creature with an outsized impact—capable of carrying Lyme disease and increasingly common across Canada as warming temperatures push its range northward. But McKay and his team at the University of Ottawa have found a surprisingly simple way to keep these ticks off trails: wood chips. In a two-year study conducted on National Capital Commission (NCC)-managed trails, spreading a border of wood chips along trail edges reduced blacklegged tick populations by nearly half. When those same wood chips were treated with a targeted application of deltamethrin insecticide each spring, tick numbers plummeted by 99%.
This isn’t just about comfort—it’s about public health. As climate change fuels more frequent storms, intense heat, and expanding tick habitats, outdoor recreation comes with new risks. Blacklegged ticks, once rare in Ottawa, are now a growing concern, especially in peri-urban forests where people hike, walk dogs, and play. Traditional advice—wear long pants, use repellent, check for ticks—relies heavily on individual behavior, which can be inconsistent. The wood chip solution offers a passive, environmental safeguard that works whether you remember your bug spray or not.
What makes this approach stand out is its sustainability. The wood chips used in the study came from ash trees removed by the NCC as part of an invasive beetle management program—turning waste into protection. By applying insecticide only to the wood chip borders, not the surrounding forest, the method minimizes harm to pollinators and other beneficial insects. It’s a textbook example of the One Health approach: protecting people, animals, and ecosystems together. Even logistical hurdles—like the 2022 derecho that upended the first year of fieldwork—led to innovation, such as using all-terrain vehicles to efficiently distribute chips along rugged trail edges.
The implications stretch far beyond Ottawa. With tick-borne diseases on the rise across North America and Europe, land managers are searching for scalable, eco-conscious tools. This low-tech, high-impact strategy could be replicated in parks, conservation areas, and suburban green spaces nationwide. It turns routine maintenance—trail upkeep and tree removal—into a form of disease prevention. As extreme weather and ecological shifts continue to reshape our relationship with nature, solutions like this remind us that sometimes, the most powerful tools are already at our feet.
And as more cities face the dual challenge of preserving access to nature while protecting public health, the answer might just be a few inches of wood chips along the path.