The Deaver Herbarium(ASC) at Northern Arizona University is located at the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau.  It houses a total of 80,000 vascular plants and 2300 non-vascular plants.  Seventy-eight percent of these collections are from Arizona and most are from the northern half of the state.  Much of this region is poorly known botanically and encompasses many diverse habitats ranging from alpine tundra on top of the San Francisco Peaks to three of the four major North American deserts (Great Basin, Mohave, and Sonoran Deserts).  Included in the region are extensive tracts of Native American tribal lands, and federally-owned lands variously administered by the National Park Service, Forest Service, and BLM.  The Deaver Herbarium houses significant collections from Grand Canyon and Petrified Forest National Parks and six national monuments (Tuzigoot, Montezuma Castle, Walnut Canyon, Navajo, Wupatki, and Sunset Crater).   Many collections have been made from the Coconino and Kaibab National Forests, BLM land, including the "Arizona Strip" and Wilderness Areas included in these entities. The herbarium is named for its first curator, Chester "Danny" Deaver, who started the herbarium in 1930.  Our permanent acronym, ASC, was assigned when NAU was called Arizona State College.

All specimens processed at ASC are cataloged in an ORACLE database administered by NAU using an ACCESS front end.  The ACCESS front end to the ORACLE database also functions as a label generation program.  Data from the three large state herbaria and many smaller herbaria are searchable though web tools developed and maintained at ASU [see http://seinet.asu.edu/collections/selection.jsp?cat=plantae). The NSF-funded all Arizona Herbaria databasing project is complete. Web tools are available to produce species lists for user-defined regions throughout Arizona as well as map distributions of all species.