José Márcio Ayres

Who was José Márcio Ayres?

José Márcio Ayres was a Brazilian primatologist and conservationist who founded the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve in 1996, followed by the Amanã Sustainable Development Reserve in 1998. The two reserves are located in the central region of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, and are joined by adjacent Jaú National Park to form a corridor spanning over 20,000 square miles of protected rainforest.

Ayres devoted his life to the preservation of the unique biota and ecosystems of the Amazon, as well as to developing a method by which rural dwellers would benefit from the conservation of natural resources. He realized that the uakari monkeys he had been studying for his doctoral thesis would stand no chance of survival unless new community-based models of natural resource management were applied to the much exploited Amazon River flood basin.

Ayres' doctorate in primatology at Cambridge, in 1986, was for his thesis Uakaris and Amazonian flooded forest, the field work for which was undertaken on the upper Amazon River floodplain, near Tefé.