Ticks are the most important medical and veterinary ectoparasites and are one of the most important arthropod groups (Lane and Crosskey 2012). Ticks belong to the order of metastigmatia which feeds on animals and humans and play an important role in the transmission of the disease. This order is composed of two common argasidae and ixodidae families(Goodman et al 2005). There are about 899 hard tick species, and 185 soft tick species (de la Fuente 2018). In Iran there’ve been recorded of 14,  5, 8, 11, 1 and 3 hard tick species of Hyalomma ,Rhipicephalus, Ixodes, Haemaphysalis, Bophilus andDermacentor respectively. Ten percent of ticks feed on domestic animals , particularly cattle, sheep and goats. These are of major health significance due to the conditions that cause human and animal diseases (Rahbari et al 2007, Masoumi Asl et al 2009, Davari et al 2017 ).

Tick-borne diseases are among the most common emerging and re-emerging diseases in recent years that have spread to different geographic areas (de La Fuente et al 2017). Several diseases including tick-borne fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Q fever, Lyme disease, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) are among the known tick-borne human diseases. (Nava et al 2009,Otranto et al 2014,Moradi Asl et al 2018 ).

Regardless of the importance of ticks in spreading different pathogens, its population structure, relative abundance and frequency, hosts type, habitats, ecology and diversity of species must be regulated. The study of tick biodiversity using various scientific indices seems to be very helpful in this regard (Masoumi Asl et al 2009, Wood and Lafferty 2013). The aims of this study was to determine the status of species diversity and richness of hard and soft ticks and their geographical distribution in the livestock of Sarab region in northwestern Iran using Simpson, Shannon Weiner and GIS software indicators.

2.Materials and methods :

2.1.Study area : Sarab s a county in East Azerbaijan Province in Iran. The capital of the county is Sarab. At the 2006 census, the county’s population was 132,094, in 31,977 families. The county is subdivided into two districts: the Central District and Mehraban District. The county has four cities: Sarab, Mehraban, Sharabian, and Duzduzan. At the 2006 census, its population was 42,057, in 11,045 families. Livestock and animal husbandry have traditionally been common in most rural households.

2.2.Tick collection :

Twenty-seven villages were selected from a total of nine districts. Ten Locations were selected in each village (human, animal and livestock storage areas, traditional and modern grain deposits, farmland attached to the village and preferably attached to active livestock sables , estimated at 300 places in total.

During the study, 441000 cattle (331000 sheep and goats) and (95000 cows and oxen) (8000 horses) and (7000 donkeys) were in the Sarab county. Therefore, ticks from a total of 2,500 livestock were collected in this study, of which 75% of the sample size were sheep and goats, 23% were cows and oxen, and 2% were horses and donkeys. Valid keys were used to identify species of the ticks (Keirans and Litwak 1989, Gregory et al 1998). This experiment was carried out under the guidance of the Ethics Committee of the Tehran University of Medical Sciences (IR.TUMS.SPH.REC.1398.058).