Excessive suspended sediment in rivers is often the combined result of complex interactions between climate, hydrology, geomorphology, and human land use. Developing a process-based understanding of these interactions represents a formidable challenge for sustainable watershed management. Toward this end, sediment budgets and sediment routing models can be used in combination as effective tools for assembling various types of information regarding the sources, sinks, and transport pathways of fine-grained sediment in rivers. Here we discuss the development of a sediment budget and routing model for the Le Sueur River, south-central Minnesota, a watershed that is naturally inclined to generate a high sediment yields for reasons that are readily compounded by ongoing human activities.