The overall goal of the project is to determine how the soil amendments used by farmers in the Coeur d’Alene River basin have impacted the availability of the heavy metals lead and zinc. The soils on the farms have high levels of heavy metals as a result of sedimentation of mine tailings during alluvial aggregation and overflow events of the Coeur d’Alene River. To increase forage yield on these soils farmers have been applying various phosphate and lime amendments over the last 1 ½ decades. Similar treatments are now being proposed as soil remediation strategies (McGeehan and Williams, 2000). Benchtop and some field trials have shown that the phosphorous amendment is particularly helpful for immobilizing Pb. It is hypothesized that this is accomplished by precipitation of a pyromorphite type mineral that has a low solubility in most natural environments. Since the farmers in the Coeur d’Alene River basin have been using these soil amendments for a long time there exists a unique opportunity to study how time and other soil factors impact the metal speciation and availability. This proposal also includes sampling from soil amendment plots prepared for a duck feeding study to examine the relationship between bio-availability and metal speciation.