Colorado Plateaus Ecoregion: Chapter 21 in Status and trends of land change in the Western United States--1973 to 2000

The Colorado Plateaus Ecoregion covers approximately 129,617 km² (50,045 mi²) within southern and eastern Utah, western Colorado, and the extreme northern part of Arizona (fig. 1). The terrain of this ecoregion is characterized by broad plateaus, ancient volcanoes, and deeply dissected canyons (Booth and others, 1999; fig. 2). The ecoregion is bounded on the east by the Wyoming Basin and Southern Rockies Ecoregions in Colorado and on the northwest by the Wasatch and Uinta Mountains Ecoregion in northern and central Utah. To the south, the ecoregion borders the Arizona/New Mexico Plateau Ecoregion, which has a higher elevation and more grasslands than the Colorado Plateaus Ecoregion (Omernik, 1987; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 1997).