The Albuquerque bosque north of Central. Drone photo by Paul Tashjian, Audubon Southwest.
Albuquerque’s bosque has been suffering a rapid dieback, as shallow aquifers drop away from the roots of the community’s beloved cottonwood gallery forest.
This is uncharted territory for our modern bosque, which grew into its present state after Bureau of Reclamation channeling in the 1950s created the modern river corridor, and flood control and water management practices created a stable source of water that allowed the forest to grow into its present state. From the late 1970s until the last couple of years, the river through Albuquerque essentially never dried, creating conditions under which the bosque could flourish. And it has become a much beloved part of our lives.
In 2026, the bottom has fallen out. We are at 58 days of dry river at the Central Avenue Bridge, where Audubon’s Paul Tashjian took this drone photo. What is usually green is rapidly browning, and it’s not clear how much longer the trees can hold out – what the point of no return might be for, by my quick-and-dirty estimate, ~1,000 acres of normally green bosque forest that is now rapidly browning.
Black: dying bosque. Map by John Fleck, using ESA Sentinel data, Google Earth Engine.
The black pixels in the above image are my best first pass at dying bosque – pixels that are normally green at this time of year that are rapidly browning. (Full map for all of the Bernalillo County Bosque, essentially the last 10 days, here.)
I had reason to hope this would not happen – that the trees with their roots in the shallow aquifer would hang on. There was good evidence for this hope – strips of bosque that have held their green in river reaches farther south as the river routinely dries, and the bosque’s relative stability during last year’s river drying. But the scale of the dieback this year, and its rapidity, shows how wrong I was.
This reflects a deep challenge in our community’s water management systems. We have well developed systems to remove water from the river and the aquifer, to take it out of the river channel and the shallow aquifer – MRGCD irrigation water diversions and the dense network of domestic wells alongside the river irrigating yards that remain green in the midst of this year’s epic drought.
But, as beloved as the bosque is, it grew up as a happy side effect of water management systems developed for other purposes. We have no effective system for leaving water in the river, or for protecting the shallow aquifer on which the bosque depends.
That is sad but as you say, the entire system is an engineered construct of which the Bosque was a byproduct.
We have lived in a mesquite bosque in the Tucson Mountains for 30 years. I helped lay the bud adobe bricks for the house. In the last decade the pattern of rain, both winter and monsoon, has left us much drier than the rest of the basin. I think this has happened climatologically because our area has ironwood (Olnea) trees, which can stand considerably less water. As I see it, we in the Southwest cannot sustain the population and water usage we have now, much less growth and infernal data centers.