To better understand water management in some key watersheds in eastern Washington, Washington State University and the State of Washington Water Research Center conducted a survey of water rights holders (WRH) and irrigation district growers (IDF) in the Okanogan, Methow, Walla Walla, and Yakima river basins. The survey was conducted between December 2020 and March 2021 with the help of Pacific Market Research, a survey research firm. The survey asked people about their use of weather forecasts, basic information about their operations, their views on water management policies, and their views and experience with water transactions. In total, 248 people responded. The survey was part of a larger project that is exploring the development of information technologies that could enhance water use now and in the future.

The first group is water rights holders (WRH) who have a water right registered with the Department of Ecology. The second group is landowners who own a parcel within an irrigation district, whom we refer to as “irrigation district farmers” (IDF). IDFs are owners of parcels within irrigation district boundaries that also have an irrigated crop. These were determined by matching geospatial data on land parcels (from county assessors), irrigation district boundaries (from the Washington State Department of Ecology, Ecology), and irrigated crop boundaries (from the Washington State Department of Agriculture, WSDA). WRHs are owners of active water rights from a surface source or owners of land associated with that water right. These were identified from records of water rights from Ecology’s Water Rights Tracking System (WRTS) and Geospatial Water Information System (GWIS), which contains a spatial identification of each water right’s place of use that was matched to land parcels to estimate a current owner name and address. We excluded from the group of water rights holders those with water rights smaller than 4 acre-feet per year and those that did not have an irrigation purpose of use.

*** This resource includes:
1. Water Right Holder Survey (pdf)
2. Irrigation District Holder Survey (pdf)
3. Combined IRD and WRH Dataset (xlsx) -- If you need more granular information about a participant's water right, please reach out to one of the owners and provide details on why this is necessary for your research.