Originally posted by @Marley in Link
Can you please steer me in the right direction of published peer reviewed scientific literature that explains the “micro-pores filled with water” (water volume / micro-pore volume) that is used to calculate moisture readings using the Geodrop and how those readings correlate to turfgrass or other plant water needs? Thank you!
We didn’t “invent” a new measurement metric. We simply scaled VWC to something that is easier for homeowners to understand. 
In case it wasn’t clear in my previous reply, let me try to explain this graphically here.
Image on the left is the same textbook image from below. Let’s take the “stereotypical” loam slice of the picture, and convert the vertical axis from decimal to percent, this will give us the image in the middle. The only thing we’ve done is change the scale. ie - we’ve done one additional work for you by detecting your soil’s actual field capacity (we achieve this by asking you to click on the “deepwater calibration” button in the App). This allows the App to tell the user that 0.28 (or 28%) VWC is actually field capacity of your soil. We then report that as 100%. The rest of the moisture values scale linearly, as shown in the image on the right.
So… why do we spend all the extra effort and computational power to do this?
The following image tries to explain this:
As explained earlier, not everyone aerate their soil every gardening season (for most homeowners reading this, this is perfectly fine by the way – as long as your loamy soil can hold enough available water between typical 3-4 days of watering interval, you do NOT need a perfectly aerated soil).
As explained earlier, the vast majority of homeowner’s soil we’ve been collecting and measuring is a lot more compacted than your typical textbook soil. So instead off the stereotypical ideal soil moisture range as shown on the image on the left, a typical compoacted soil has a reduced field capacity (more compacted soil → less micropores → less water that the soil is able to absorb) as shown on the image in the middle anbd on the right.
Even back in early day Alpha stage testing in 2022~2023, we’ve already learned that showing homeowners VWC is not useful, becasue people will think that they have NOT watered enough, and will keep watering (wanting to see moiture level reaching closer to 28% field capacity), but in fact this is actually NOT possible, and will result in A LOT of water run off and wasted water.
So we’ve decided tthat instead of showing VWC, it’s much more intuitive for homeowners to simply scale VWC such as “100% moisture” means the soil is fully soaked and people should stop watering.
Lastly, since GeoDrops is simply scaling VWC to better tell homeowners when to stop watering, there’s no scientific paper since we’re still using VWC after all. If you’re curious about the effect of aeration and soil compactness and why this is such a big deal on changing the soil’s moisture response, even if it’s the exact same soil composition, you can find a lot of scientific paper by simply doing a google searchj.
See: Google Search
Please let me know if this helps!
Lawrence