In December 2017, EOS reported that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) was cancelling a $100 million research project, launched in 2015 and due to continue until 2025. The project, known as “Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiment–Tropics” (NGEE-Tropics), brought together over 130 scientists from DOE’s national laboratories and external organizations to study how tropical forests will respond to climate change. According to the EOS report:
“During the 2.5 years that NGEE-Tropics has operated, project-funded scientists have been involved in nearly 60 peer-reviewed publications . . . The project has built a portal to provide data to the wider research community and released an initial version of its Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator (FATES), a tropical ecosystem model incorporating collected data.”
The project was scheduled to continue until 2025. However, in the spring of 2017, NGEE-Tropics project leaders began telling collaborators that it would shut down in 2018.
Update:
Despite reports that the NGEE-tropics program was set to be terminated, the federal FY2019 budget included an allotment of "not less than" $5.8 million for the NGEE-tropics program, as proposed by the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Energy and Water Development Subcommittee.