…More than 150 scientists and experts had collectively spent thousands of hours working on a draft report, a first-of-its-kind assessment of nature across the United States. But President Trump ended the effort, started under the Biden administration, by executive order. On Jan. 30, the project’s director, Phil Levin, sent an email telling team members that their work had been discontinued. But it wasn’t the only email he sent that day. “This work is too important to die,” Dr. Levin wrote in a separate email to the report’s authors, this one from his personal account. “The country needs what we are producing.” Now key experts who worked on the report, called the National Nature Assessment, are figuring out how to finish and publish it outside the government. …Rajat Panwar, a professor of responsible and sustainable business at Oregon State University who was leading the chapter on nature and the economy, was preparing slides to present his section when he got the news.