Analyzing 632 vernacular water supply records from eHRAF World Cultures, the author identified twelve different ecological wisdom (EW) strategies that she believes have the potential to conserve socio-ecological water systems, repair the negative effects of climate change, and hopefully lead to long-term resilience. In this chapter she focuses on two of these strategies in particular; matching sources and uses, and using soil and vegetation to preserve water quality. The chapter posits that these two strategies may prove to be especially useful solutions for an array of highly impacted regions.

This chapter comes from a book chiefly concerned with the issue of "ecological wisdom." The concept of ecological wisdom is defined as historical and contextual knowledge about both a local environment and the systems and relationships present in that environment. In this chapter, the author is specifically interested in ways that ecological wisdom is involved with water conservation strategies. To this end, the author collected 1012 records of water systems from eHRAF World Cultures which were qualitatively coded into 12 types of ecologically wise water conservation strategies. Two of these strategies are then explored in detail.