"RIVER EYES" - RIO GRANDE DROUGHT MONITORING, 2001 THROUGH 2006

Drought conditions, coupled with river-flow and other water management requirements associated with the Endangered Species Act, have put tight constraints on water operations in the Middle Rio Grande region in central New Mexico in recent years, and necessitated close cooperation between the various agencies involved in water management. “River Eyes” is a cooperative, inter-agency river monitoring effort that has resulted from these conditions. The program involves monitoring of the Rio Grande between Cochiti Dam and Elephant Butte Reservoir, with emphasis on the reach between Albuquerque and Fort Craig, NM. River flow measurements and observations made under this program are used to aid Federal water management agencies in meeting the March 2003 Biological Opinion's (BO) flow targets and other specific elements of the BO's requirements related to river operations, and to provide timely and relevant information to the Service to assist in rescue efforts for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow (RGSM).

The NMISC and its contractor S. S. Papadopulos & Assoc. (SSPA) have been active in the River Eyes Program since its inception in 2001. Field activities performed by the NMISC River Eyes team have involved observations of flows and identification of flow intermittency and pooling, stage readings at established staff gages, discharge measurements to confirm gaged flows or to determine flows in ungaged portions of the river, and water quality measurements. These measurements and observations have been reported to an interagency water operations team on a daily basis, and are used to notify Fish & Wildlife Service Rescue crews in time to rescue endangered RGSM that might be stranded in isolated pools in discontinuous reaches or in lateral pools adjacent to flowing reaches.

Although the focus of the River Eyes program is not data collection, sufficient data have been collected during the program to provide insights that may aid in low-flow river operations and management, or the siting of habitat restoration projects. The NMISC team has compiled much of the collected data on river intermittency and pooling, flow measurements, and river access into a set of linked databases, and applied GIS tools to summarize and analyze the data. One of the results of these efforts is a series of maps highlighting the tendency toward intermittency of various reaches of the river.