The United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Mobile District has ongoing projects as part of the Mississippi Coastal Improvements Program (MsCIP) and coast-wide beach and dune projects. One of these projects was the restoration of Ship Island, a Mississippi barrier island that was devastated by Hurricanes Camille and Katrina, resulting in the disruption of littoral sediment transport in the system. The Mobile District, in collaboration with the National Park Service, placed over two million cubic yards of sediment and planted over 300,000 grass plugs across three years.

Under MsCIP, long-term adaptive management requires detailed sediment budgets—in 2025 and 2030—that account for sediment volumes across the coastal zone. These sediment budgets are valuable in coastal research, planning, and engineering, as they account for all sediment sources, sinks, and transport values within a coastal system. The MsCIP long-term adaptive management requires that budgets verify the sand restoration volumes are adequate for enhancing sand supply to the littoral transport system to help maintain Ship Island.

High-resolution, high-accuracy remotely sensed elevation data products from various federal partners were utilized to support this effort. The 23 datasets acquired from 1998 to 2025 along the Mississippi and Alabama barrier islands, each with varying extents of geospatial coverage, helped create the baseline and 5-year sediment budgets. These budgets, created using the Sediment Budget Analysis System [SBAS), aim to verify that the sand restoration volumes that were placed have maintained the barrier islands and enhanced natural littoral transport over time.