"How do we learn? We learn by traveling. How do we increase our impact? By collaborating while traveling."

Professor Daniel Blumstein has been working abroad for four decades building a career that remembers that “science is not pigeonholed and scholarship is not pigeonholed... by celebrating and supporting and encouraging international collaborations, we bring good to the world. We bring good to ourselves.” Professor Blumstein believes that strong environmental science comes from casting a wider net. “You learn from others much more when you have a wider palette of ideas and places to look at," and, in his work, variation does not simply mean working in different countries but also expanding the range of ideas and methods that help shape scientific discovery.

From scoping reviews to document similar behavior seen in urban wildlife around the world, to the development an ecotourism guidebook for a remote Pakistani park, Professor Blumstein understands that to work internationally in a meaningful way takes varying approaches. In working with philosophers and biodiversity scientists in Australia, Blumstein notes that proper conservation decision making may not necessarily create the “best thing for the biodiversity” but may instead be beneficial for animal welfare or the cultural values a community has. But these values too are important. As one approaches community engaged conservation projects, Blumstein believes that “ideally, you want to co-create projects” because we alone “don't see the options, [we] don't know there are other ways of doing things, [we] don't understand other constraints, unless [we] think broadly,” and that this is the true value of international research and education.

Professor Blumstein has also been working on projects that require bringing together the research and data of international partners. Right now, Peter Mikula, a former Fulbright Fellow in Blumstein’s lab and Blumstein are assembling the world’s largest Flight Initiation Database (FID) that brings together about 186,000 observations for around a quarter of the species of birds across all continents. This upcoming dataset will help researchers worldwide create new analyses to understand how birds respond to humans and urbanization globally. Blumstein says for his own work that “developing international data sets really allows you to put the anecdote of Los Angeles in a global context.” While open data allows for more ambitious research, Blumstein emphasizes that it depends on the people who collect, organize, and clean them. Their work, he argues, also deserves recognition along with the discoveries that come from their data.

There is no one single method that is best to study the world’s environmental challenges, but Blumstein believes that “It's all hands on deck. We know the pieces of the solution, but it's very hard to implement those, partly because they're diverse and need to be put together correctly.” A career working with scientists, policymakers and communities across cultures and borders reinforces that need to “celebrate the diversity of ideas and say diversity may mean diverse solutions for different locations.” As we look forward, Blumstein encourages us to keep a global view in mind because “if we want to continue to be a world-class institution, we need to continue taking a global view of what we do.”