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Abstract Deforestation due to land-use and land-cover (LULC) change has been linked to increased emerging zoonotic disease risk despite limited local level data on such outbreaks. This Forum reevaluates this risk inference using newly released data on zoonotic disease outbreaks, accounting for Structural One Health features, including socioeconomic development and armed conflict covariates. Event and time series data on disease and forest coverage anomalies at the 0.5-degree level for every month between January 2003 and December 2018 are used to estimate the relationship between LULC and zoonosis using Poisson generalized additive and generalized linear models. Once adjusted for Structural One Health features, outbreak risk is 7%–200% higher in areas that experienced forest cover reversion. These results highlight the importance of accounting for Structural One Health factors when analyzing complex socioecological phenomena such as the LULC–infectious disease nexus. 

Deforestation alters wildlife communities and modifies human–wildlife interactions, often increasing zoonotic spillover potential. When deforested land reverts to forest, species composition differences between primary and regenerating (secondary) forest could alter spillover risk trajectory. We develop a mathematical model of land-use change, where habitats differ in their relative spillover risk, to understand how land reversion influences spillover risk. We apply this framework to scenarios where spillover risk is higher in deforested land than mature forest, reflecting higher relative abundance of highly competent species and/or increased human–wildlife encounters, and where regenerating forest has either very low or high spillover risk. We find the forest regeneration rate, the spillover risk of regenerating forest relative to deforested land, and how rapidly regenerating forest regains attributes of mature forest determine landscape-level spillover risk. When regenerating forest has a much lower spillover risk than deforested land, reversion lowers cumulative spillover risk, but instaneous spillover risk peaks earlier. However, when spillover risk is high in regenerating and cleared habitats, landscape-level spillover risk remains high, especially when cleared land is rapidly abandoned then slowly regenerates to mature forest. These results suggest that proactive wildlife management and awareness of human exposure risk in regenerating forests could be important tools for spillover mitigation.