WATER PLANNING AT A GLANCE: SYSTEMS AND TOPICAL ANALYSIS OF REGIONAL PATTERNS FOR THE STATE OF TEXAS

The 16 regional water plans of Texas provide a detailed set of information and descriptive data about the current status and future direction of water resources management for the state. This study used the most recent 2016 regional plan submissions from the Texas Water Development Board, to evaluate the ‘Watermark’ methodology. This approach uses statistical modeling to analyze sets of text documents, known as the corpus. The mathematical framework of Topic Modeling analyzes the arrangement and frequency of words, and groups of words to extract abstract topics from the corpus. The goal is to create a reproducible set of code, methods, and libraries for further Topic Modeling research on state water plans, as well as other environmental science and policy documents. For this study, the nearly 19,658 pages of text from the Texas state regional water plans were analyzed. Results indicate that “water” is the central common theme connecting all topics, other primary topics found throughout all regions include planning, strategy, and groundwater. Differences in themes reflect the gradient of arid to humid climates from west to east respectively. Themes which are extracted indicate that regional water planning groups in the west focus more heavily on irrigation and wells for agriculture, while in the east the focus tends to be more on municipal uses and surface water strategies, such as reservoirs and infrastructure. This thematic pattern also aligns with the population distribution of Texas, with a larger amounts of people in the east, and much less dense populations in the west. Topic analysis provides an accessible and systematic approach to evaluate the context of water planning, management and policy across the state. This methodology may provide a mechanism for linking quantitative science knowledge about water resources in the state with the qualitative planning and policy perspectives we use to manage them.