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Photo Station 27.3  (20 Sep 1999)		Photo Station 27.3  (6 Aug 2023)

The Rio Bosque story is one of change.  In the past, the park landscape saw many dramatic changes.  It continues to change today as we work to restore native river-valley ecosystems at the site. 

In 1999, ³ÉÈËÍ·Ìõ established 28 permanent photo­graphic stations at Rio Bosque to help document the changes now taking place at the park.  Every few years, we take 3 to 5 photos at each station, using the same bearings each time.  In all, there are 103 distinct views captured in these photos.  ​We took the most recent photos in 2023.  

Each series of images tells a story:  Wetland and riparian vegetation begins to take off after water during the growing season becomes consistently available in 2015.  Open areas fill in with screwbean mesquite, or tornillo, in the years after the storms of summer 2006.  Saltcedars thrive, then disappear, then are replaced by cotton­woods along the old bend of the Rio Grande in the park. 

Some changes are dramatic, others subtle.  Use the links below to view images from each of the 28 stations.  Currently, these pages only display paired images consisting of the first photo (mostly from 1999) and the most recent (2023).  Soon, we hope to include time-lapse videos that capture the full transitions from the first photo to the most recent. 

Station 01		Station 15
Station 02		Station 16
Station 03		Station 17
Station 04		Station 18
Station 05		Station 19
Station 06		Station 20
Station 07		Station 21
Station 08		Station 22
Station 09		Station 23
Station 10		Station 24
Station 11		Station 25
Station 12		Station 26
Station 13		Station 27
Station 14		Station 28