Data is Plural: Western water rights. Matthew D. Lisk et al. have compiled and standardized a dataset of water rights records — key documents in the allocation of the scarce resource — in the Western United States. Drawing on raw data collected from 11 states, the harmonized dataset “provides consistent unique identifiers for each spatial unit of water management across the domain, unique identifiers for each water right record, and a consistent categorization scheme that puts each water right record into one of 7 broad use categories.” Those categories: irrigation, domestic, livestock, fish, industrial, environmental, and other. The authors have also published a set of shapefiles outlining each water management area’s boundaries.