Becoming climate sentinels

Abstract In South Korea, forest scientists refashion themselves as “climate sentinels” as they confront subtle yet disquieting shifts in plant seasonality brought about by climate change. Unlike traditional sentinels, who watch for external threats from a frontier, climate sentinels face ecological anomalies and surprises—such as untimely flowering—that have permeated everyday spaces. To register such ecological perplexities, they engage in technoscientific entrainments: deliberate, disciplinary, and laborious coordinations of human observers, trees, protocols, institutions, and modular devices into a shared rhythm of attention. These experimental processes redistribute the traditional embodied technique of mokch’ŭk (eye observation) across nationwide phenological observation networks while reanimating the ecological significance of plant seasonality. For these sentinels, confronting climate change requires attending not only to satellites and heavily computed models but also to the distributed, more‐than‐human experiments through which ecological perplexities are made sensible on the ground.