Zero-Shot Forecasting of In-Situ Soil Moisture and Temperature with a Time-Series Foundation Model

Soil moisture and temperature govern plant-water availability and microbial activity, making them key indicators for evaluating land-restoration efforts on degraded landscapes, but the physical and data-driven models normally used to forecast them both need information that a newly instrumented restoration site does not yet have: hydraulic parameters for the former, months of per-site training data for the latter. We evaluate TimesFM, a 500M-parameter time-series foundation model, zero-shot on 15-minute telemetry from 27 sensor stations across three land-management regimes (Control, Treatment, Scald) at a semi-arid restoration site, forecasting 5 cm and 30 cm soil moisture and enclosure temperature at seven lead times from 1 h to 168 h. Using gap-aware rolling-origin evaluation across sensors, we find TimesFM beats the best rule-based statistical forecasting baselines (persistence, seasonal-naive, or 7-day climatology) by 21–76% at sub-daily lead times but loses by 6–79% beyond a day, a pattern explained by a diurnal-alignment mechanism that holds for both soil-moisture depths and temperature. A CatBoost baseline trained walk-forward on the same origins with full history and weather covariates never wins overall, and we show its weakness is partly a cold-start effect specific to short deployments. We additionally quantify the inference cost of zero-shot forecasting on commodity CPU hardware. Our results highlight a practical trade-off between zero-shot forecasting capability, predictive performance, and computational efficiency.