Quaternary Sciences Northern Arizona University
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The Collections

Sandy Swift, LQP Collections Manager
Meet Sandy Swift, LQP Collections Manager

Northern Arizona University is home to several important natural history collections, including the largest modern pollen reference collection from the Colorado Plateau and Sonoran Desert, and the most complete collection of gastropods from the arid Southwest. These have now been cataloged in an online, searchable relational database called BECBase. The majority of the data in BECBase comes from the Colorado Plateau, a physiographic province in western North America covering an area of roughly 337,000 square kilometers in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado.

The following collections are of particular interest to Quaternary scientists:

Laboratory of Quaternary Paleontology (LQP) Collection
USGS/NAU Macrobotanical Laboratory Collection (MBL)
Modern Pollen Reference Collection, Laboratory of Paleoecology (LOP)