Sediment budgets are the basis for sediment management, but making budgets is at present more an art than a science. Furthermore, budgets do not show where eroded sediment is going and where accreted sediment comes from. We will develop a new, objective method that will resolve the partitioning of tidal basins in elements that show coherent behavior between subsequent bathymetries. This will enable us to calculate detailed sediment budgets of estuaries and tidal basins, and provide validation datasets for modeling.