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JIM MCMAHON/MAPMAN ®
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Every Friday during her sophomore year, Alexa Martinez would leave BioTech High School in Miami, Florida, and hop on a bus parked outside. It wasn’t a typical yellow bus used to transport kids to and from school, though—it was a botany lab on wheels. The vehicle, called the STEMLab, was created as part of the Million Orchid Project to give students like Alexa the chance to study and protect local plants.
The project, launched by the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, aims to plant 1 million orchids in urban areas across South Florida. The garden’s botanists hope the effort will save the state’s six native orchid species from extinction in the wild. BioTech is one of 100 local schools that have partnered with the botanical garden to help out. Students at member schools get to work in the STEMLab and learn all about how flowering plants reproduce and grow (see From Seed to Plant).