Colorado Water Rights & Well Permits - DWR Registers

Two registers from the Colorado Division of Water Resources, together: 310,858 decreed water rights and 651,900 well permit applications, joined on the water-district identifier.

Low cost

From $0.00005 per record, down to $0.00003 at Gold. Pay only for the records you actually receive - the whole register stays queryable, you are never billed for the scan behind it.

Two corpora, one key

Pick a corpus and search it:

• rights (default) - every decreed water right: the ditch, well, reservoir, spring, pipeline or well field it sits on, the water source, the decreed uses, the appropriation and adjudication dates that fix its priority, the decreed rate and volumetric limit, the water court case, and the location.
• wells - every well permit application, from receipt through construction to abandonment: status, driller's permit, designated basin and management district, the physical completion (depth, perforated casing, yield in gpm, static water level) and the address.

A well permit carries a wdid that keys the water right decreed against it. mode=profile with a wdid returns the right plus every well linked to it - one exact join, no name matching.

Filter it

• County - county="DOUGLAS" (case-insensitive).
• Structure - structureType="Ditch", "Reservoir", "Spring".
• Source - waterSource="LARAMIE", "SOUTH PLATTE".
• Where / district - division=1, waterDistrict=2.
• Well status - currentStatus="Well Constructed", "Permit Issued", "Well Abandoned", "Permit Expired".
• Physical - minDepth=500, minYield=100.
• Exact ids - wdid, receipt, permit; caseNo matches a substring.

Note: structureType and currentStatus are matched exactly, so "Well" does not also return "Well Field".

Example inputs

Every ditch in one county - combine corpus and filters.

{ "corpus": "rights", "county": "GARFIELD", "structureType": "Ditch", "maxResults": 25 }

A senior right, and the wells on it - the profile join.

{ "corpus": "rights", "mode": "profile", "wdid": "0100753", "maxResults": 100 }

Producing wells by status - corpus=wells.

{ "corpus": "wells", "currentStatus": "Well Constructed", "minYield": 500, "maxResults": 50 }

Counts by structure - mode=aggregate.

{ "corpus": "rights", "mode": "aggregate", "groupBy": "structureType" }

Or roll up a corpus

Set mode=aggregate and get a rolled-up count by a dimension of the chosen corpus - structure type, county, division, water district, adjudication type or plan type for rights; status, county, designated basin, management district, permit category or location type for wells. Every group comes back - this mode is not cut off by maxResults.

Example output

One water right - corpus=rights:

{
 "platform": "co-water-rights",
 "corpus": "rights",
 "recordType": "waterRight",
 "mode": "rows",
 "wdid": "0110212",
 "waterRightName": "SMITH LFH WL FLD",
 "structureType": "Well Field",
 "waterSource": "LARAMIE FOX HILLS",
 "county": "DOUGLAS",
 "division": "1",
 "waterDistrict": "1",
 "appropriationDate": "2006-11-30",
 "adjudicationDate": "2006-12-31",
 "caseNo": "06CW0245",
 "maxDecreedRate": "",
 "totalVolumetricLimit": "9.9000"
}

mode=aggregate, groupBy=structureType - one count row per structure:

Well                92,889
Ditch               82,160
Reservoir           50,551
Spring              34,291
Well Field          16,227
Pipeline             9,035

Notes on the data, from the source

• The well -> right link is one-way and partial. 80,293 of the 651,900 well rows (12.3%) carry a wdid; a right keys many wells or none, and most well rows predate the field. A profile returns the wells that actually resolved, not a claim that they are the only wells on the right.
• These are historical registers, not live feeds. A well permit's permitIssued reaches back decades. modified is the source's own edit stamp, and sourceUpdatedAt carries the newest one - the freshness signal an agent can read without running the actor.
• maxDecreedRate and totalVolumetricLimit are only populated where the decree set them, so blank is normal.
• Counties are stored uppercase, but the filter upper-cases what you pass, so a mixed-case county still matches.