Disease ecology has seen many recent advances in identifying macroecological patterns of disease, disease emergence, and host-pathogen associations. These results are of great importance to directing future studies and resources in ecology and public health.  In this session, we will explore the future of this developing field in terms of methods, data, and theory. What can we learn from these global-scale patterns about mechanisms of disease circulation, transmission, and evolution? Are these patterns predictive across scales or to useful degrees of accuracy? Are we collecting the right data to answer these questions? What methods can we use to overcome the limitations of biased, noisy global data sets, and what fundamental limits are there to macroecological approaches?  This Inspire session will gather ecologists with a variety of perspectives to debate these questions and explore the opportunities for linking pattern and mechanism in disease macroecology.