G3+Roan+Plateau

media type="file" key="roanplat photo story.wmv" width="267" height="268" align="right"THE ROAN PLATEAU The Problem: There is a large argument over the fate of the Roan Plateau. Since large pockets of oil lie there many people want to set up drilling rigs. Others want to keep it the way it is since it provides healthy populations of elk, deer, and trout making it great for fishing and hunting. The Roan Plateau is just over 127,000 acres and is located immediately northwest of Rifle, CO. The BLM leased the Plateau for 113.9 million dollars. With the oil rigs that are already there you can count on there being multiple oil spillls over the years. If we have a lot of oil spills on the Roan Plateau we can guarantee that there will be drastic decreases in population due to the oil pollution.

The Roan Plateau : The Roan Plateau is located in the Parachute Creek Canyon. It is home to many species including the Green Back Cutthroat trout. The highest elevation at this beautiful place is 9,286 ft. The plateau has extremely dry and snowy winters. The plateau percipitates about 10.87 inches a year. There are lots of convectional storms during the summer. The plateu is made of many different rocks such as, sandstone, marlstone, silstones, mudstones, clays, conglomerate, limestone, and oil shale. The plateau also contains many different soils through out different places of the palteau. The Roan also has several different ecosystesm. It has Pinyon-Juniper Woodlands, Douglas Fir Forest, Subalpine Fir, and Aspen Forests. In these habitats there were also many plants such as, Gambel's Oak, mountain mahogjany, serviceberry, sagebrush, chokecherry, juniper, pinyon, saltbrush, rabbitbrush, and a variety of grasses. This place is a beautiful place for people to visit. It has breath taking views of nature and wildlife. If we continue to let these people drill on the plateau those beautiful things will dissapear. We need to find another place for the people to drill or else the Roan Plateau will die and everything else will die with it. Abiotic Factors : Rocks, water, air, dirt, temperature, sun Biotic factors : Plants, animals, bacteria, algae, insects Conservation Efforts : My group thinks that BLM made a bad decision on drilling on the Roan Plateau. We think that instead of ruining this beautiful place we should be saveing. Why would we have to drill on a beautiful place? Why cant we drill in the middle of the desert instead. Instead of drilling the whole Roan Plateau we think that they should drill only a small portion of the plateau. If we only drilled a small portion of the plateau there would be less pollution to the whole plateau which means less amimals would die and more recreation could happen.

