Although the passage of the Clean Water Act spurred significant recovery of native fish populations, habitat degradation continues to limit species recovery into their historic ranges. Conservation translocation – reintroducing fish into their former native range - is a common management strategy used to overcome these barriers to natural recovery, but not all fish species respond similarly to translocation efforts. Thus, there is a critical need to learn from translocation successes and failures to maximize the chance of recovery success. The bluebreast darter (Nothonotus camurum), variegate darter (Etheostoma variatum), and Tippecanoe darter (N. tippecanoe) were formerly endangered in Ohio and have been reintroduced to their native ranges in six Ohio rivers via yearly translocation events that began in 2016, 2020, and 2018, respectively. There has been wide variation in species re-establishment following translocation. One proposed explanation for this variation is differences in habitat quality. Habitat complexity, or the spatial arrangement of objects such as rocks and logs in a riverine habitat, is an understudied component of habitat quality that may influence this variation. High levels of benthic habitat complexity provide shelter and surface area for foraging and reproduction, therefore encouraging population growth following translocation. However, siltation lowers benthic habitat complexity by occluding benthic interstitial space. To determine the influence of benthic habitat complexity on translocated darter populations, we employed a transect-based method to measure substrate size (including silt) and rugosity, or surface roughness, at each translocation site. We predict that 1) sites with higher rates of siltation and 2) less diverse substrate assemblages will be associated with lower darter population sizes due to less physical space to forage, reproduce, and shelter in. This study will provide critical knowledge natural resource managers can reference to perform more effective conservation translocations, as well as generally further the field of conservation science.