Zoonotic diseases are caused by pathogens passed from animal hosts to humans, either directly or by vector species such as ticks or mosquitoes. Globally, emerging or re-emerging zoonotic disease events are clearly increasing and are largely vector-borne. For example, a recent U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report indicated doubling of tick-borne bacterial and protozoan human cases between 2004 and 2016 just in the United States. For many vector-borne diseases, land use change (including both landscape composition and spatial pattern) has been implicated as a primary or contributing cause of disease emergence through impacts on human-animal interactions, natural biodiversity and species abundance changes, range expansion of invasive and vector species, etc. Consequently, the ecology of land use change must be part of the solution to emerging vector-borne diseases. However, resolution of the impact of land use change on vector-borne diseases is complicated by economic and social factors that influence land use; examples include land management policies, economic development and economic disparities, human-land use interactions, and human migration. The objective of this symposium is to summarize and assess interactions between human land use and vector-borne diseases from multiple viewpoints in order to identify new perspectives, promising and insightful methodologies to understand impacts of land use change on human disease risk and potential land use practices that may contribute to reduced risk of vector-borne diseases. Specific goals include: (1) To examine disease control as an ecosystem service related to biodiversity in changing landscapes; (2) To review patterns of vector-borne disease in relation to land use and socioeconomic conditions across rural to urban gradients; (3) To examine and critique modeling, spatial analysis and landscape genetics approaches for understanding vector-borne disease dynamics; and (4) To discuss the interactions of land use policies/laws with vector-borne disease control to promote human, environmental and animal health. This symposium will provide an overview of land use change effects on vector-borne diseases from a broad spectrum of perspectives in order to couple fundamental ecological principles and methodologies with disease risk management. Concepts and implications included in this overview are broad and touch on many sub-disciplines of ecology. Attendees should gain further appreciation of the ecological complexities surrounding vector-borne disease dynamics within changing landscapes as well as insight to the complications of vector-borne disease risk management when ecological interactions play out on a land use stage driven by socio-economic factors.