The matches, as open data
DitchBook publishes its verified company-to-WDID matches — the link between a Colorado mutual ditch or reservoir company and its water structures — as a downloadable dataset, free to reuse. It's the same 300 tier-1 matches behind the directory and the map, in one file instead of one page at a time.
What's in it
One row per matched company: its Secretary of State identity, its DWR structure ID(s), water source, earliest decreed year, county, and — on every row — a citation URL to the underlying state record, so any match can be checked at the source. It's built for researchers, other water-data projects, journalists, and anyone else who wants the raw matches rather than clicking through company pages one at a time. Full methodology, including what disqualifies a match: how DitchBook is built.
What it isn't
- Not a complete list of every Colorado ditch or reservoir company's water rights — only companies matched at the tier-1 standard are included, and matching is deliberately conservative.
- Not a substitute for a title search, a water-rights engineering analysis, or the DWR record itself — it's a compilation of public records, offered so the relationship doesn't have to be rebuilt by hand.
- Not a live feed — it's a dated, versioned snapshot. The registry itself refreshes monthly; this dataset is republished when matches change enough to warrant a new version.
- Companies matched
- 300
- Format
- CSV, one row per company
- License
- CC BY 4.0
Corrections
Found a match that doesn't check out? Tell us — corrections ship the same day, and demotions are recorded in the dataset's changelog rather than silently dropped.