The mineral belt of Colorado has been subjected to extensive hard-rock mining activities for over 100 years. At the cessation of mining activities, many of these mines were abandoned with little-to-no environmental remediation leaving many ongoing environmental impacts. Hard-rock mining can cause detrimental impact to the land, streams, and underground aquifers in the area and downstream. A partnership with Trout Unlimited and the Telluride Valley Floor (TVF) was enacted with the goal of mitigating some of these impacts through the removal of a tailings pile and stream habitat restoration. One of the objectives was improving the quality of instream habitat for local fauna. However, the project did not include monitoring of the aquatic macroinvertebrate community. Benthic macroinvertebrates are prominent in freshwater ecosystems and can exhibit large-scale impacts within a scaled-down environment. With macroinvertebrates, research can be done on their individual size distributions (ISDs, also known as size spectra). ISDs are consistent across ecosystem and habitats, and describe the general pattern of declining abundance of individuals with increasing body size. Studying the ISD relationship within this restoration site can elucidate the effects of human activities, such as land use and mineral extraction, on the freshwater biological community, as well as provide reference data for future analyses. Moreover, the present research proposal aims to collect macroinvertebrates from three to five stations in the project area with two primary goals: 1) assess the current conditions of the biotic community above and below the tailings pile and 2) collect pre-restoration data for a planned before-after-control-impact study to be conducted once the mitigation efforts have been completed.