ABSTRACT
Infectious disease ecology is a rapidly evolving field focused on understanding how hosts, pathogens, vectors, and their environment evolve, respond, and interact with one another in ways that influence the spread of disease. A recent review of the land-use change and infectious disease ecology literature identified over 300 articles, the majority of which documented increased pathogen transmission with anthropogenic alterations to the landscape. Landscape epidemiology is a field nestled within the broad study of disease ecology that explicitly examines the influence of landscape structure on disease risk. Nearly two-thirds of human infections are zoonotic, meaning that they are animal pathogens that have been transmitted to humans. Studies from a variety of ecological contexts have documented how landscape changes can influence the frequency and intimacy of interaction between humans and zoonotic disease reservoirs and propagate microbial transmission between species.
