Landscape composition and suitable habitat influence the presence of species, their distribution and their movements. Landscape changes thereby affect species community composition, and indirectly influences disease risk. In this presentation I will illustrate how landscape changes can affect disease risk of various pathogens, via its impact on species occurrence, species richness, species diversity, and species movements and migration networks. For instance, by modelling migration networks of suitable stopover sites and analysing the effect of migration network complexity on avian influenza prevalence, we were able to predict spatio-temporal variation in avian influenza infection outbreaks. Other examples include the role of landscape heterogeneity on Lyme disease and other emerging zoonotic pathogens.