THANKS TO TWO ROLEX LAUREATES, AN AMAZON RESERVE IS AT THE CUTTING EDGE OF BIOACOUSTIC TECHNOLOGY
Since their inception in 1976, the Rolex Awards for Enterprise – now part of the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative – have been a bellwether for planetary progress through a powerful combination of science, technology, ingenuity and passion. In their near half-century of life, the Awards have received a total of almost 37,000 applicants from 191 countries, of whom 160 exceptional individuals have been selected as Laureates. Among the five winners of the 2002 Awards were two environmental champions: Brazilian primatologist and conservationist José Márcio Ayres, founder of the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve in the Brazilian Amazon, and French bioacoustics scientist Michel André, singled out by the Rolex Awards jury for his invention of an underwater device that detects the sounds of whales and alerts nearby ships to avoid collisions.

Ayres’s conservation work in Mamirauá began with efforts to study and protect the bald uakari monkey, a primate with a striking red face, endemic to the area, whose population was in rapid decline. He soon realized that, as a visitor to the rainforest, there was only so much he could do, so he devised a new approach to conservation based on collaboration with local people, and in 1996 the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve was born. Rather than trying to expel them from the area, Ayres’s model prioritizes the wellbeing of the communities just as much as that of the wildlife they live alongside, and gives them access to a way of earning an income that does not rely on depleting the natural resources around them, instead working as reserve managers.

By 2002, this new model of conservation had been so successful that Ayres won a Rolex Award, allowing him to expand the project to the neighbouring Amanã Reserve, creating what was, at the time, the largest continuous stretch of protected rainforest in the world.

Although Ayres tragically passed away just a year after reaching this milestone, his legacy lives on, with Mamirauá’s conservation model being replicated the world over. He left behind a brilliant and committed team who continue to manage and protect Mamirauá. Emiliano Esterci Ramalho was only an intern when he met Ayres, but now has been living and working on the reserve for 20 years, becoming the scientific director of the Mamirauá Institute, a social organization established by Ayres in 1999 to carry out research to support the conservation and sustainable use of Amazonian biodiversity.

“WE ARE FOLLOWING MÁRCIO’S VISION. 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.”
Ramalho

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 realized that Mamirauá’s founder was the fellow Rolex Awards Laureate with whom he had coincided a decade earlier. He 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 aircrafts 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 in order 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 customized 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. In the near future, André and Ramalho plan to roll out Project Providence across the whole 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 and complement 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.

ABOUT THE PERPETUAL PLANET INITIATIVE
For nearly a century, Rolex has supported pioneering explorers pushing back the boundaries of human endeavour. The company has moved from championing exploration for the sake of discovery to protecting the planet, committing for the long term to support individuals and organizations using science to understand and devise solutions to today’s environmental challenges.

This engagement was reinforced with the launch of the Perpetual Planet Initiative in 2019, which initially focused on the Rolex Awards for Enterprise, as well as long-standing partnerships with Mission Blue and National Geographic Society.

The initiative now has more than 30 other partnerships in an expanding portfolio. They include, for example, Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen, Rewilding Argentina and Rewilding Chile, offspring organizations of Tompkins Conservation, the Under The Pole expeditions, the Monaco Blue Initiative, and Coral Gardeners.

Rolex also supports organizations and initiatives fostering the next generations of explorers, scientists and conservationists through scholarships and grants, such as Our World-Underwater Scholarship Society and The Rolex Explorers Club Grants.