A challenge to all temporally resilient human groups is to acquire and process ecological knowledge in a manner that permits the collective recognition of important natural environmental fluctuations, random disturbance processes, and anthropogenically-induced disturbance regimes. This project attempts to capture some regional parameters of ecological knowledge of both rural and urban inhabitants of the Upper Chattahoochee Watershed in north Georgia, the sole catchment area for the troubled water supply of the metropolitan Atlanta area.|The hypotheses of the study were based on a well-developed literature indicating that high income, positive environmental attitude, greater age, higher education level, and male gender were associated with greater ecological knowledge. It was hypothesized that previous studies privileged urban, educated markers of ecological knowledge by measuring general knowledge of ecology --which may have little importance toward ecological behavior in particular contexts. In contrast, this project developed measures of local, in-situ ecological knowledge more relevant to ecological behavior and motivation due to their inherent measurement correspondence. It was hypothesized that using the new measures, first-hand knowledge (situated knowledge that springs from experience) would be more prevalent in the rural areas, and that second-hand knowledge (from cultural sources) would be more prevalent in the urban areas of the watershed.|While the results of the study mirrored the central hypotheses, the findings were not significant. However, because a significant inverse relationship was found between overall ecological knowledge and environmental attitude in the rural respondents, it is argued that the nascent first-hand and second-hand knowledge measures were both capturing first-hand knowledge. Importantly, then, rural respondentscontrary to the literature but predicted by our original hypotheses -- scored higher than urban respondents on this knowledge measure, and did not at all share the environmental attitude of the urban region. Thus new measures of ecological knowledge may yield different and more relevant results toward the question of urban and rural ecological knowledge and attitude.