The Bureau of Land Management has completed a suite of long-awaited land use plan updates and habitat conservation strategies to better protect Gunnison sage grouse and big-game habitat and migration corridors in Colorado.
Among the final decisions BLM announced Thursday is the approval of two resource management plan updates covering 1.6 million acres in western Colorado that have raised the ire of the oil and gas industry and some congressional Republicans for closing areas to leasing.
BLM said the Grand Junction and Colorado River Valley updates leave open 85 percent of lands that have been analyzed and determined to have high potential for oil and gas.
But they close hundreds of thousands of acres to future oil and gas leasing.