Mixed Methods Approach to Identifying Frequently Reported Water Scarcity Issues in the Upper Colorado River Basin between 2000-2024

To understand water scarcity issues in the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB), our research team collaborated with librarians at the Department of Interior with access to Lexis Nexis to query its newspaper and congressional research databases for topics of interest between 2000 and 2024 in our area of interest in the UCRB. The data were pre-processed into a tabular format and loaded into a custom application where social scientists conducted inclusion and exclusion screening, and assigned topic and geographic tags to the articles. The articles that fit the inclusion criteria and the associated metadata were then fed into a Structural Topic Model (STM). The model generated commonly detected topics and other statistics from the content of the articles. The model can be used by researchers or agencies to understand frequently reported themes in an area of interest and the workflow to curate and review articles more efficiently. Several child items are included here to explain how the research was performed.

Child Items descriptions: 
- Data prep and modeling support files - includes code and inputs required to prepare the article text and metadata for review and modeling
- Geographic data - using place names associated with articles, county, state and HUC6 details were intersected to provide richer geospatial data
- Model cross validation support files - includes code and inputs required to assess the fit of the model selected

For each model, the child item includes plots of the expected proportions of the topics in the model, including probability terms to help understand the topic, and other csv exports from the STM analysis as well as an XML formatted Metadata file to explain the field headings in the csv.

- Access Model - Factors that support or limit ability to use the available water. These include legal and policy restrictions, physical infrastructure, and socioeconomic conditions such as cost. 
- Coping Model - The ability to deal with the effects/impacts of losses or harms suffered
- Exposure Model - Describes condition of contact with external stressors, duration and/or extent to which a system is subject to disturbance by a stressor. e.g., factors of number of events, hazard exposed population, losses suffered
- Quality Model - Chemical, physical, or biological characteristics that make water suitable/unsuitable for its intended use
- Quantity Model - The amount of water physically available for use 
- Susceptibility Model - The likelihood to suffer harm or loss from an event

Attached Files descriptions: 
- Water Scarcity Articles Metadata_sb.xml - Contains the FGDC Metadata file describing the Water Scarcity Articles Metadata CSV file
- Water Scarcity Articles Metadata.csv - Contains the bibliographic data and curated information about the news articles included in the study
- Project workflow and artifacts diagram.png - A depiction of each of the steps in the analysis
- PRISMA_2020_flow_diagram.docx - A PRISMA flow diagram explaining the literature review process
- Bibliography.docx - Contains a list of the R packages and software used to support the data processing and modeling efforts
- Water Scarcity UCRB Data Release File Manifest.csv - A list of all the files in the data release and their purpose/intent