Thematic coding of news media on water availability in the Upper Colorado (2000 - 2024)

News articles which described issues of water availability in the Upper Colorado River Basin were retrieved from the Lexis Nexis database. Articles covered the period January 1, 2000 to March 2, 2024. Thematic coding was used to assess how media described risks associated with water availability, the consequences of and responses to those risks. These data support a multidisciplinary project, Thematic Coding for Water Security in the Media, which seeks to understand perceptions of water scarcity, the distribution of factors driving risks associated with water availability, and institutional responses to those risks. This data release provides the codebook used to analyze the data and themes developed from the analysis. Full transcripts of the news articles are omitted due to license restrictions of the database from which they were originally obtained.