Dani Buffa

Professional Bio

Dani is a Dual-Title Ph.D. student in Anthropology and Climate Science at Penn State. Inspired through a lab tech job at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum researching historical shellfishing along the Chesapeake Bay, she focuses her research on estuarine socioecological dynamics. Her current research investigates regime shifts in the coupled human and natural systems by studying how mollusk fishery productivity is affected by paleoclimatological fluctuations, maintenance and loss of traditional ecological knowledge, and subsistence practices. Her work centers on Southwest Madagascar’s Fagnemotsy seasonal estuary. Dani integrates an array of methods from ethnoarchaeology, paleoecology, and complex systems modelling to study human-environmental interaction through time.