Nonautonomous differential equations on finite-time intervals play an increasingly important role in applications that incorporate time-varying vector fields, e.g. observed or forecasted velocity fields in meteorology or oceano graphy which are known only for times t from a compact interval. While classical dynamical systems methods often study the behaviour of solutions as t → ±∞, the dynamic partition (originally called the EPH partition) aims at describing and classifying the finite-time behaviour. We discuss fundamental properties of the dynamic partition and show that it locally approximates the nonlinear behaviour. We also provide an algorithm for practical computations with dynamic partitions and apply it to a nonlinear 3-dimensional example.