The Ems Estuary presents an enigmatic environment where a storm-generated intertidal basin interacts with a navigation channel subject to extremely high suspended sediment concentrations. Despite ebb dominance in parts of the navigation channel, the residual transport is directed landward, necessitating continuous maintenance dredging. The puzzling context has led to the suspicion that the intertidal basin delivers sediment to the main channel, rather than acting as a storage area. A field campaign has been setup to quantify and analyze suspended sediment transport processes controlling the sediment balance in a rectangular control volume over the width of the navigation channel, which is bounded on one side by the intertidal basin. The control volume is chosen exactly in the stratified region where the tidal flow switches from ebb dominant to flood dominant. Standard equipment including multifrequency ADCPs, a CTS, a LISST200X, and an OBS were employed, and new frame was developed to obtain centimeter scale velocity profiles of the bottom meter. Results reveal the mechanism by which the intertidal basin plays a key role in the residual landward sediment transport in the navigation channel.@en