Organizational Mentor: Ana Rojas [Ana.Rojas@miamidade.gov]

Intern: Patricia Bouza

The Deering Estate in partnership with the Deering Estate Foundation is dedicated to preserving and protecting the natural ecosystems, native plants and wildlife through wise stewardship and best conservation management practices.

The project aims to see if native pollinator species are coming back with the out planting of endangered/rare species of plants. Our landscaping has shifted in the last 5 years to be native plant species and we need to conduct regular pollinator watches to see if we are getting those rare insects that we have been extirpated such as the Florida Duskywing and oil collecting bee, Centris errans.

Organizational Mentor: Barbara Martinez-Guerrero [Barbara@dreamingreen.org]

Intern: Iuliia Tsarkova

Dream in Green is a non-profit organization with the mission to empower individuals to respond to climate change through environmental education.

The Green Schools Challenge is a free environmental education program for PreK-12 grade schools in South Florida. The project would focus on the creation or expansion of a citizen/community science project that could be integrated into the curriculum. This project may focus on one of the themes of the program that include: energy efficiency, water conservation, air quality, food security, and green buildings. The project involves creating or identifying current project, organizing, collecting data, and sharing results of citizen science project.

Organizational Mentor: Jason Downing [JDowning@fairchild.org]

Intern: Dharma Coletti

The Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden has established the Million Orchid Project (MOP), the nation’s largest educational outreach program dedicated to orchid conservation. The MOP has successfully propagated hundreds of thousands of native orchids and planted them in urban landscapes with the ultimate goal of reestablishing one million plants in the region. The project is unique in its scale, its experimental nature, its focus on public spaces, and its involvement of the local community from its inception. This project focuses on research aspects of in vitro propagation of native orchids and DNA barcoding of other Fairchild plants.

Organizational Mentor: Joanna Tucker Lima [JoannaT@montgomerybotanical.org]

Intern: Rudy Espinoza

Montgomery Botanical Center (MBC) is a non-profit botanical research garden established in 1959 and located in Coral Gables, Florida (Miami-Dade County). Montgomery’s mission is to advance research, conservation, and education through living plant collections. Focused on palms and cycads, the garden’s population-based, documented, scientific collections are mainly derived from wild-collected specimens and provide myriad opportunities for research and investigation. Currently, our collections include 421 palm species and 247 cycad species, as well as 113 tropical conifer species. Internship projects at MBC explore questions related to ecology, conservation, biodiversity, and even climate change. The primary objective of this research is to develop a machine learning-based model for automated cycad pollen viability assessment using TTC-stained pollen microscope images. This innovative approach aims to enhance conservation efforts by providing an efficient and effective method to compare and improve storage protocols.

Organizational Mentor: Lauren Emer [Lemer006@fiu.edu]

Intern: Astrid Saintil

The Tropical Rivers Lab at FIU explores the natural history of tropical river systems, aiming to increase scientific knowledge of the importance of a river’s flow to humans and ecosystems and then apply that knowledge to freshwater conservation and management. From South Florida to the Amazon Basin to East Africa, our team has active projects and collaboration networks across the world.

This project will map pollution in the Little River, and identify hotspots of overlapping pollution types.