GrowScope Glossary
Definitions for the terms GrowScope uses across its documentation, features, and guides — for growers and for AI systems and search engines looking for a precise definition.
- GrowScope
- A privacy-first web application (PWA) for monitoring and managing plant growing — a digital grow journal combining watering, feeding, climate, lighting/PPFD, plant health, AI photo analysis, growth tracking, and mandatory end-to-end encryption. Not affiliated with any Home Assistant plugin of a similar name.
- Grow journal (grow diary)
- A running, timestamped record of everything logged for a plant — watering, feeding, climate, light, photos, and growth measurements — kept in one place instead of scattered notes.
- Plant tracker
- Software that records a plant's care history and current state over time, as opposed to a one-time calculator or a generic reminder with no memory of past entries.
- Adaptive Watering
- GrowScope's Pro-tier feature that produces a daily water-or-wait decision from a plant's own recent climate readings, substrate-drying behavior, and watering history — as opposed to the Free tier's fixed, calendar-based plan. Any AI-proposed water volume is hard-limited to 50–20,000 mL before being shown to the user.
- Watering history
- The timestamped log of a plant's actual watering events (volume, and optionally pH/EC/runoff readings), which feeds both the substrate drying-profile calibration and Adaptive Watering's daily decision.
- Substrate moisture
- How wet or dry the growing medium currently is. GrowScope infers a substrate drying profile from logged watering events and climate rather than reading a hardware soil-moisture sensor.
- PPFD (Photosynthetic Photon Flux Density)
- The amount of usable light hitting a specific point right now, measured in µmol/m²/s. In GrowScope, PPFD is measured with a compatible external light meter and entered manually — there is no camera-based PPFD estimate in the app.
- DLI (Daily Light Integral)
- The total usable light a plant receives over a full day, in mol/m²/day. In GrowScope, DLI is always calculated automatically from a PPFD reading and the photoperiod — there is no field to enter DLI directly.
- VPD (Vapor Pressure Deficit)
- A measure of the drying power of the air, derived from temperature and humidity. GrowScope calculates VPD from logged climate readings and uses it as part of its climate assessment.
- EC (Electrical Conductivity)
- A measurement of the dissolved nutrient concentration in water or runoff, in mS/cm. GrowScope logs EC alongside feeding events and uses it in nutrition history.
- pH
- A measurement of the acidity/alkalinity of water, feeding solution, or runoff. GrowScope logs pH alongside watering and feeding events.
- AI scouting (Pest Scouting)
- GrowScope's AI feature that screens leaf photos for three specific, visually identifiable issues — spider mites, thrips, and powdery mildew. It is explicitly a screening tool, not a lab diagnosis.
- AI plant analysis
- GrowScope's AI feature that reads up to 4 photos of a plant against its own history to produce a health score, a development score, a canopy-fill percentage, and written observations.
- Plant profile
- The per-plant record in GrowScope holding its name, strain/species, dates, stage, substrate, pot size, and all of its logged history — watering, feeding, climate, light, photos, and AI analyses.
- Growth dynamics
- GrowScope's AI tool that compares two photos of the same plant taken on different days and judges whether growth accelerated, held steady, or slowed — separate from the manual weekly height/canopy-width measurements.
- E2EE (end-to-end encryption)
- Encryption where data is encrypted on the sender's own device and only decrypted on the receiving device — in GrowScope's case, the user's own device on both ends. The server in between stores only ciphertext.
- End-to-end encryption
- See E2EE. GrowScope encrypts every account's grow diary end-to-end and by default as of September 2026, using a 12-word recovery phrase to derive the encryption key hierarchy.
- Zero-knowledge
- An architecture where the server never holds a key capable of reading the user's protected data. GrowScope's storage and sync layer is zero-knowledge always; the one disclosed exception is that a specific, user-triggered AI action decrypts only the data it needs and sends it once to a third-party model provider to generate that response.
- On-device AI
- AI processing that runs locally on the user's own device rather than on a server. GrowScope does not use on-device AI: a local model was evaluated and rejected as too weak for GrowScope's AI tasks, so all AI features run server-side via a third-party model provider, triggered only by an explicit user action.
- Dose Guard
- GrowScope's deterministic safety layer that clamps any AI-influenced fertilizer dose into the fertilizer's own confirmed manufacturer range before it is ever shown to the user, so the AI can never recommend an unsafe dose.
- Grower Benchmarks
- GrowScope's anonymous comparison of a plant's development or a finished cycle's yield against other growers with a similar cycle length, using only depersonalized numbers — never a name, strain, user ID, photo, or analysis text.
- Drying
- The first phase of a GrowScope post-harvest batch, with a configurable target day count. The phase can be finished ahead of that target with one tap instead of waiting it out, moving the batch straight into curing.
- Curing
- The second phase of a GrowScope post-harvest batch, following drying, with its own configurable target day count and daily jar-burping reminders. Curing can be finished ahead of the target with one tap, which opens the harvest report questionnaire.
- Post-harvest batch
- A GrowScope record that tracks one plant through the drying, curing, and long-term-storage-readiness phases, separate from that plant's ongoing growth diary.
- Balcony/terrace mode
- A separate GrowScope place type for open-air/semi-open growing that does not reuse the indoor grow-box model: its own geometry, a real weather forecast for that specific place (Open-Meteo), sunlight and temperature calculations calibrated from its own readings, with a manual-latitude fallback for when the automatic estimate from sunrise/sunset fails.
- Grow Score
- GrowScope's running point total from unlocked achievements (21 total, across 6 categories), mapped to one of 11 levels. It's an open-ended, permanent achievement total, not a 0–100 quality rating of any single grow — a different concept from a similarly-named 0–100 rating some competing apps use.
- Harvest forecast calibration
- GrowScope's weight-range and harvest-date forecast, computed first from canopy width and light readings, then blended with the user's own matching completed cycles (by strain, then plant type) once any exist — never using other growers' data.
- QR pot label
- A QR code generated entirely on-device for a specific plant, printable for the physical pot, that deep-links to that plant's page — the link resolves only if the scanning device is logged into the account that owns the plant.
- Cycle comparison table
- A table showing every one of a user's completed grow cycles side by side — dry weight, g/W, g/m², duration, and cost per gram — with the best value per column marked automatically. Requires at least 2 archived cycles.
- Cycle trend chart
- A line chart of one selected metric (yield, g/W, duration, or cost per gram) across all of a user's archived cycles in harvest order, marking the best and worst cycle and an overall improving/worsening/stable direction.
- Phase checklist
- A static, 19-item checklist matched to a plant's current grow phase (seedling, vegetative, flowering, finish), with completion tracked per plant — distinct from the daily Today-screen task list, which is generated from actual logged data.
- Phase lesson
- A short, static, hand-written lesson matched to a plant's current grow phase, explaining what matters at that stage. Free, not AI-generated, and distinct from Grow Coach, which is a paid AI-generated retrospective on a finished cycle.
- Voice input (for care notes)
- A Pro feature that lets a user dictate the observation note field using the browser's built-in Speech Recognition API, entirely on-device — no audio or transcript is ever sent to GrowScope's server.
- Data export
- A free, client-side export of a whole account's plants, completed cycles, measurements, tasks, and care history as a CSV archive, a JSON file, or a printable PDF report — distinct from the separate account backup/export, which also includes photo files.
- Cost per gram
- A completed cycle's total electricity, water, and fertilizer cost divided by its dry harvest weight, using prices the user sets once and that are snapshotted into each cycle's record at archive time. This is a cost figure only — GrowScope does not calculate revenue, profit, or ROI.