Case Study: Center for Plant Conservation achieves documentation of pollinators for 1,000+ endangered plant species with Caspio

The Center for Plant Conservation at San Diego Zoo Fights to Save Species from Extinction

The Center for Plant Conservation (CPC) at the San Diego Zoo preserves America’s most imperiled native plants—maintaining the National Collection of Endangered Plants (750+ species)—and faced a pressing data challenge: they needed a secure, standardized online database that volunteers with limited technical training could use from multiple devices and locations, all on a tight budget. Their legacy system was office-bound and hiring a programmer was cost‑prohibitive.

Using Caspio’s low‑code platform, CPC ecologists built an embeddable, point‑and‑click Pollinator of Rare Plants Database on a Microsoft SQL Server backend, enabling secure, scalable data entry, duplicate prevention, and rapid deployment without heavy development costs. The solution documented pollinators for over 1,000 endangered species, improved data quality and collection speed, supported seed‑bank tracking, and expanded collaboration while keeping costs low.

Center for Plant Conservation

Katie Heineman

Scientist