By Ben Neary/NMWF
More than 100 miles of the Rio Grande in Central New Mexico went dry in June and remained dry through the summer. When Paul Tashjian, director of freshwater conservation with Audubon Southwest, recognized in August that trees in the Albuquerque bosque were dying, he took immediate action.
Within weeks of realizing that a massive tree die-off was taking place, Tashjian brought together government officials and others and coordinated the upstream release of 2,000 acre feet of water – more than 600 million gallons – from Abiquiu Reservoir.
Tashjian will give a free presentation Nov. 11 in Albuquerque about the water release and the work by his group and others to study its subsequent effects on the bosque. He’s the featured speaker this month in the New Mexico Wildlife Federation’s “Wildlife Wednesday” series.
Tashjian said his talk will address what New Mexicans should be thinking about to keep the ecosystem alive. He said he’s seen drought wipe out whole riparian systems in Arizona.
“Source New Mexico” reported in early September that 112.4 miles of Rio Grande between the Cochiti and Elephant Butte Reservoir had gone dry before the release. Sharon Wirth, Middle Rio Grande bureau chief with the Interstate Stream Commission, told the news organization that September’s figure marked the highest number of dry miles since at least 2007 – far more than the previous record of 78.9 miles set in 2025.
The release water, belonging to the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, started flowing on Aug. 31 and reached Albuquerque over the following days.
Several agencies monitored the effects of the release on the bosque. Tashjian said officials are looking into creating a program to continue such releases as necessary in future years.
“We’ll talk about the history of the Rio and how it’s evolved from this very wide channel that provided all this habitat to this sort of managed farmland ecosystem that’s providing parts of the same sort of stuff but in different ways, and some of what those important components are,” Tashjian said of his presentation.
Before coming to Audubon Southwest in 2018, Tashjian spent 26 years working as a regional hydrologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the Southwest. His expertise includes water management and water protection for wildlife, river restoration, water law, and wetland workshop coordination.
According to the Audubon Southwest website, Tashjian was the founder and coordinator of the Bosque Hydrology Group, an inter-agency, inter-university think tank that focused on the physical restoration of the Middle Rio Grande in New Mexico. He coordinated the quantification and protection of water rights on National Wildlife Refuge with Department of Interior solicitors and federal and state water management agencies, conducted numerous studies and workshops to improve wetland management on Refuges, and implemented river restoration projects throughout the southwestern United States.
Audubon Southwest as well as several other private and government agencies monitored the recent water release to study the effects of the water on the health of the bosque.
“This one-time release will allow us to gather important data about how water flows through the river following a period of extended dryness, the relationship between the river and groundwater, and the effect of such a water release on plants and trees,” Water Authority Board Chair Barbara Baca said this summer. “It’s also our hope that this will aid vegetation and wildlife affected by the ongoing drought.”
In addition to Audubon Southwest, the following organizations and agencies have been studying the effects of the release: the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission, New Mexico Tech, the state Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources, and Audubon Southwest. Also participating are the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Department, Utton Center, and Bosque Ecosystem Monitoring Program (BEMP).
“We sort of had this emergency, and it’s really sort of amazing that we pulled this off in like two weeks,” Tashjian said. He emphasized that the water utility has made it clear that it can’t commit to similar releases in the future.
“And that’s sort of the question – how do we set something like this up and also set something up where it’s not happening after 90 days of drying,” Tashjian said. He said the groups are working to set up a system of groundwater monitoring wells that will alert them when it’s necessary to stage a water release to keep the bosque alive.
“This summer it would have been good to have two of these releases, one at the end of June and the other at the end of July,” Tashjian said. Even so, he credited the water authority with stepping up and taking action this year.
Tashjian said he expects the various groups will hold a workshop in coming weeks to examine preliminary information about the benefits of the release.
This year’s dry conditions may have killed 25 percent of the trees in the bosque, Tashjian said. “We’re going to see more of this, and this El Niño year will be a great reprieve. It’s crazy how much water is out there now.”
Trees in the bosque were hit particularly hard in areas that have a lot of private, domestic wells that allowed landowners to continue to pump groundwater close to the river after surface flows dried up, Tashjian said.
“How do we ever rein that in, I don’t know,” Tashjian said of domestic well pumping. “But this points to that being a problem for sure. I don’t think it points to that being coincidental, this line-up that we’re seeing.”
Conditions on the Rio Grande are now entirely different, thanks to heavy rainfall that started in September, Tashjian said. “I was scared we were going to lose the whole forest,” he said. “I think this little release helped, and I think the bigger storm release helped a lot. We’ll just look at that.”
Tashjian’s free talk will begin at 5:30 p.m. Nov. 11 at the Marble Brewery NE Heights Taproom, at 9904 Montgomery Blvd., NE, in Albuquerque.
