  Land conversion and the resulting contact between domesticated and wild
species has arguably been the single largest contributor to the emergence of
novel epizootic and zoonotic diseases in the past century. An unintended
consequence of these interactions is zoonotic or epizootic disease spillovers
from wild species to humans and their domesticates. Disease spillovers are edge
effects of land conversion and are sensitive to the size and shape of converted
areas. We combine spatial metrics from landscape ecology with theoretical
epidemiological models to understand how the size and shape of land conversion
affect epizootic and zoonotic disease transmission of single and two species
populations. We show that the less compact the converted area, and the the
greater the depth of the contact zone, the more rapidly will an introduced
disease spread through the domesticated population.
