Democratic Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy has secured funding to re-establish the Northeastern States Research Cooperative.
The collaborative was first created in the 1998 Farm Bill to support research between the U.S. Forest Service and colleges in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and New York.
More than 300 grants were distributed to study ecological, cultural and economic challenges in the northern forest. But the cooperative had not received any federal funding since 2016.
Senator Leahy obtained $2 million to reestablish the program and new projects are expected to start by 2021.