Animal movements are an essential component of individual fitness and population dynamics, and also affect species interactions, community composition, and ecosystem functioning. Long-distance animal movements, such as migration and nomadism, are particularly important for community and ecosystem processes, including the dispersal and transmission of infectious diseases. Spatio-temporal patterns in resources (e.g., food, water, habitat) are key drivers of these long-distance movements. Human activities such as urbanization, agricultural development, and climate change alter the quantity and stability of resources available to wildlife, which can in turn alter the distance and frequency of animal movements. Understanding the interactions between landscape change, animal movement, and infectious disease transmission is crucial for informing wildlife conservation and public health in changing landscapes. In this dissertation, I focus on nomadic animal movements, which are irregular long-distance movements with little seasonal signature. First, I review the literature on nomadic movements and describe their prevalence across space and taxa; their general patterns and drivers; and their potential impacts on communities and ecosystems. Next, I build a mathematical model of nomadic animal movements in both naturally-varying and human-altered landscapes to understand the rules that animals might use when deciding when to move, and the effects of urbanization on animals moving according to different rules. I then extend this model to explore the consequences of changing movement patterns for infectious disease transmission in urbanizing landscapes. Finally, I apply this framework to two real-world systems. I analyze GPS tracking data from American white ibis (Eudocimus albus) in South Florida, USA, to understand how individual movement patterns scale up to affect habitat connectivity between urban and nonurban patches. I also perform a comparative analysis using a database of host-parasite associations to understand the relationship between movement patterns (resident, nomadic, or migratory) and parasite diversity in ungulates. Collectively, this research demonstrates that, for nomadic animals, movement forms a crucial link between landscape change and infectious disease transmission in wildlife; however, these effects are complex and their direction depends on the drivers and cues of movement. This work also provides multiple frameworks and avenues for further understanding the ecological effects of wildlife responses to human development.
