The 2024 edition has quadrupled its hands-on workshops. Instead of just listening to lectures about Artificial Intelligence (AI) tracking jaguars, attendees are now deploying those models in real-time on the Rio Negro. Returning visitors will immediately notice the upgrades. The festival has expanded its footprint to three separate "biome zones": The Flooded Forest (várzea), The Highland Camp (terra firme), and the newly added Urban Canopy —focusing on the sprawling city of Manaus itself. 1. The Bio-Acoustic Symphony Dome The most popular attraction of Part 2 is the immersive audio installation. Using 500 remote recording devices placed deep in the forest, engineers have created a 360-degree soundscape. You can hear the difference between a healthy forest (filled with primate calls and insect clicks) and a degraded forest (eerily silent). Visitors wear noise-canceling headphones while standing on vibrating platforms that mimic the thrum of a kapok tree. 2. The Drone Rodeo Forget rodeo bulls. In Part 2, Brazilian pilots compete in an obstacle course through simulated deforestation smoke. The winning drone prototype gets a government contract for real-time fire monitoring. This year’s champion, a local student named Cauã Ribeiro, flew a thermal-imaging drone that can spot a logging truck from 2,000 meters at midnight. 3. Indigenous Data Sovereignty Pavilion Perhaps the most politically significant addition. eNature Brazil Festival Part 2 has dedicated an entire pavilion run by the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB). Here, Indigenous mapmakers are teaching attendees how to use GPS and satellite phones to demarcate ancestral lands. The key takeaway? Data is the new arrow. Day-by-Day Breakdown of the Main Stage If you missed the live stream, here are the headline moments from the six-day event.
One protester, Maria dos Santos, told our reporter: "We don't need better drones to find loggers. We need to arrest the politicians who license the loggers. The festival is a distraction." enature brazil festival part 2
The general public was invited. Over 10,000 locals used a modified version of iNaturalist (called eNature BR ) to photograph urban wildlife. In just six hours, they documented 1,200 species, including the rare pied tamarin, which researchers thought was extinct in that part of the city. The 2024 edition has quadrupled its hands-on workshops
Equipped with handheld DNA sequencers (Oxford Nanopore MinIONs), participants identified mosquito species near the convention center to track potential zoonotic diseases. They found three viruses previously unknown to science. The festival has expanded its footprint to three
Teams competed to solve the "acai berry supply chain" crisis. The winning app, FrutaJusta , uses blockchain to ensure that pickers receive fair wages by scanning the exact tree where the berry was harvested.
Over $50 million USD was pledged by international consortiums to build a fiber-optic cable network along the Amazon River. The goal: bring 5G connectivity to forest rangers by 2026. Technology Steals the Show The "eNature" in the title stands for "Electronic Nature," and Part 2 leaned heavily into emerging tech. The most buzzed-about tool was the "Leaf-VR" headset. Unlike traditional VR, which uses computer-generated imagery, Leaf-VR uses real-time 4K video from camera traps. You put the headset on, and you are sitting inside a tapir’s nest. When the tapir moves, you feel the sway of the nest via haptic feedback.
The Governor of Amazonas declared the festival a permanent state asset. A symbolic "digital tree" was planted—a 3D hologram that displays real-time carbon absorption rates.