Listening to life

Using sound technology and community collaboration, two Rolex Laureates have helped Mamirauá Reserve in Brazil set a global benchmark for sustainable conservation.

23 November 2024

Since 1976, the Rolex Awards for Enterprise – now part of the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative – have celebrated innovative contributions to science, technology, and conservation. Among the 2002 laureates were José Márcio Ayres, a primatologist and conservationist, and Michel André, a bioacoustics scientist, whose respective projects have significantly influenced environmental conservation.

Ayres established the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve in the Brazilian state of Amazonas in 1996 to protect the bald uakari monkey, a species native to the region. His approach combined wildlife conservation with community involvement, enabling local residents to work as reserve managers while promoting sustainable livelihoods. This model later expanded to the neighbouring Amanã Reserve, creating one of the largest protected rainforest areas globally.

Despite Ayres’ passing in 2003, his legacy endures through the Mamirauá Institute, founded in 1999. Emiliano Esterci Ramalho, now the institute’s scientific director, has continued this work for two decades.

Bioacoustics expert Michel André analyses rainforest sound data aboard a customised riverboat.

Conservation work integrates advanced bioacoustics with traditional ecological knowledge.

Hydrophones capture underwater soundscapes, revealing biodiversity below the surface.

Team members position acoustic sensors high in the forest canopy for optimal sound collection.

Local communities in the Mamirauá Reserve play a key role in conservation efforts.

Scientists inspect acoustic nodes installed in the Mamirauá Reserve’s treetops.

The Mamirauá Institute’s mobile laboratory analyses multi-layered biodiversity data.

A member of Project Providence retrieves recording equipment deep in the Amazon.

Bald uakari monkeys, endemic to the Mamirauá region, benefit from ongoing conservation efforts.

Michel André's work with Project Providence expands bioacoustic monitoring across the Amazon basin.

“We are following Márcio’s vision,” says Ramalho. “The sustainable development reserve model is the core of the Mamirauá Institute, so we’re following what I truly believe Márcio envisioned for the institute and for the success of the sustainable development reserve model.”

Such was Ayres’ passion for the Amazon that he continues to inspire action on its behalf today. In 2013, André visited Mamirauá and was amazed by the beauty of its rainforest landscape, its fine state of preservation, and the success of the reserve’s radical model of close involvement with riverside communities. He soon realised that Mamirauá’s founder was the fellow Rolex Awards Laureate with whom he had coincided a decade earlier.

He then decided to apply his expertise to a massive project in Mamirauá. For more than 25 years, André has been pushing boundaries in the field of bioacoustics research, specifically in the use of sound as a tool for monitoring and protecting biodiversity in some of the world’s most vulnerable ecosystems. As he says, the perception of sound is perhaps the only sense shared by creatures across all ecosystems.

While traditional surveying tools like remote sensing satellites and aircraft can map the canopy, they lack the sensitivity required to produce an accurate picture of the reality on the ground, so in 2016, André and Ramalho launched Project Providence. By applying bioacoustics techniques to monitor the state of biodiversity in the Amazon basin, Project Providence offers a new perspective on the rainforest’s rich biodiversity and could help us understand it better than ever before to inform conservation strategies.

Working together with Ramalho, André has managed to install a total of 22 acoustic sensors, or “nodes”, throughout Mamirauá, which record sounds across a range of wavelengths and several kilometres, as well as video footage. Once a year, the team retrieves the nodes from their treetop locations deep in the forest, taking them to a mobile laboratory on board a customised riverboat for maintenance and analysis.

The multi-layered “sound map” of biodiversity and habitat obtained from this information constitutes what is possibly the largest single bioacoustics database in the world.

The project is set to expand across the entire Amazon basin.

Helping to safeguard the future of the planet would be impossible without collaboration, and this story shows how one conservation project can enrich another, even across decades. Thanks to a fellow Rolex Awards Laureate, the pioneering work of Mamirauá’s founder Ayres has found a whole new dimension twenty years after his death.

The Perpetual Planet Initiative, launched by Rolex in 2019, supports individuals and organisations addressing environmental challenges using science. Initially focused on the Rolex Awards for Enterprise, it now includes partnerships with Mission Blue, the National Geographic Society, and numerous other initiatives.

rolex.org

Global gathering

Achievements awarded

Global gathering

Achievements awarded