Archive of posts filed under the New Mexico category.

The Rio Grande cutthroat trout and the Endangered Species Act

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The US Fish and Wildlife Service earlier this month (December 2024) once again declined to list the Rio Grande cutthroat trout as “endangered.” It’s a native species endangered (in the colloquial sense, not the legal sense) by both anthropogenic habitat changes (warm temperatures, less water, dams and stuff) and non-native immigrant species. USFWS identified non-native …

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MRGCD Board Approves Abiquiu Storage Deal

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The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District Board this afternoon (Monday Oct. 14, 2024) approved an agreement among the District, the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, and the Bureau of Reclamation for temporary storage of District water in Abiquiu Reservoir on the Rio Chama while El Vado Reservoir is out of comission. This is a …

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Finding Albuquerque’s Northeast Passage

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I left for my Sunday morning bike ride today as early as an alarm, coffee, and breakfast would allow – to beat the heat. To structure the route, I set myself a puzzle: to ride from Albuquerque’s Old Town, paralleling the Rio Grande to the north, all the way up the valley to the north …

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Albuquerque’s Aquifer

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  I’ve been a) Playing with Datawrapper as a tool for displaying data here on Inkstain, and b) Thinking about Albuquerque’s aquifer as bad summer river flows force us back onto groundwater (City #2, in the North Valley, is one of a quartet of groundwater monitoring wells drilled in the late ’50s as Albuquerque’s population …

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In New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande, the wheels are coming off

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Talking to Jake Bittle for his Grist piece on the trials and tribulations of El Vado Dam, he asked me a question I loved: “What does this mean in the larger scheme of things?” My answer: We’ve optimized entire human and natural communities around the way this aging infrastructure allows us to manipulate the flow …

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