The previously mentioned depositional environments are created by the various physical and biological processes of transporting and depositing sediments. These processes result in various distributions of grain size and biogenic sedimentary structures that characterize (or classify) the deposited sediment through a direct relationship to the depositional force that produced them.

Relating the features found in an environmental structure back to the forces that created them is the basic method used by geologists to interpret the depositional environment of the sedimentary sequence.