$8 million bosque restoration project could be model for more ‘pearls’ along the Rio Grande

Milkweed grows on a terraced bank of the Rio Grande just south of an outfall where 50 million gallons of clean water are released into the river daily from the Southside Water Reclamation Plant.

“All the water that goes down the drain in Albuquerque and Bernalillo County and into the municipal sewer system eventually ends up here,” said Bernalillo County Commissioner Frank Baca. The water is treated at the reclamation plant before being released into the river, and the outfall is the fifth-largest tributary into the Rio Grande.

The terraced riverbank is part of an 11-acre project to restore the floodplain next to the river, and could be a model for more restored bosque habitat along the Rio Grande. The $8.6 million project included removing invasive plants — clearing out a wall of trees, terracing the riverbank, planting over 33,000 native plant species and adding roughly 1 mile of new trails for biking and hiking.

“We’ve already been talking to our partners about taking this model and creating what the state’s calling a string of pearls,” or a series of restored habitats in the bosque along the river, said Diane Agnew, Water Rights Program manager with the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority.

Funding came from the state — with $5 million from the Legislature and Water Trust Board and $566,000 from the Office of Natural Resources Trustee — and the federal government, in the form of a $3 million WaterSMART grant from the Bureau of Reclamation.

Capital outlay dollars allocated by state legislators were key to building momentum for the project, said Office of Natural Resources Trustee Maggie Hart Stebbins.

“I grew up on the river in Los Chavez,” said Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, D-Albuquerque, one of the legislators who allocated funding to the project. “And the river, I believe, is the heart of New Mexico.”

The water authority and its partners seeded cottonwood and willow, along with native grasses, which benefit the monarch butterfly and appeal to animals like the endangered New Mexico meadow jumping mouse. The willows have already demonstrated self-propagation, one of the success metrics for the project.

“It’s a pretty diverse plant palette,” Agnew said. “What we’re looking to do is build multi-layer vegetation, because that’s what we know the migratory birds like and the endangered birds like.”

There’s already been more wildlife in the area, Agnew said. A heron has been spotted hanging around, and wild turkeys have been walking the trail.

The Rio Grande was heavily channelized in the latter half of the last century, limiting seasonal flooding and making irrigation water deliveries more predictable. But a channelized river is not always helpful for fish species like the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow that like to spawn in shallow pools. In theory, the terraced bank creates an ideal habitat for fish spawning.

The bosque restoration could provide proof of that theory, giving other agencies involved in river management useful data about how native fish interact with a terraced riverbank, according to Agnew.

Some plants, like cottonwood trees, also rely on flooding to propagate. There were older cottonwoods in the area, but they couldn’t produce new trees.

“The cottonwoods we planted will just be happier and happier, because then we get that natural watering event, and then they’ll start propagating, making more cottonwoods,” Agnew said.

The water authority removed jetty jacks, large metal structures that were used in decades past to stabilize the riverbank. Now, small bushes with yellow blossoms peek through what looks like a rope net, enmeshed into the ground. The rope is coir matting, a bioengineering technique to prevent the floodplain from eroding until the plants are mature enough to prevent erosion on their own, according to Agnew. The material also soaks up water, keeping moisture near the plants’ roots when they are establishing. It’s made of coconut fiber and will degrade over time.

A line of six large, white birds with black-tipped wings flew over the river Thursday morning, before a ribbon-cutting ceremony to mark the finished project. A longtime resident of the Mountain View neighborhood, Mark Rudd, was given the oversized scissors.

Rudd first came up with the idea of restoring the floodplain using some Office of Natural Resources money. He dreamed of a broader wetland, a legal impossibility because of the way Rio Grande water is allocated.

“You can’t always get what you want. But if you try some time, you just might find, you get what you need,” Rudd said as he cut the ribbon — quoting the 1969 Rolling Stones’ hit.