Over the last three decades, river management has changed its basics and perspective, due to the recognition that engineering approaches focused on the local scale were limited for sustainably managing rivers and preventing ecological alteration. Flood risk management, for example, has been integrated into a wider perspective with an emphasis on lowering peak flows based on catchment-scale buffers rather than local flow acceleration, moving from flood defense to flood risk management (Merz et al., 2010). Peak flow lowering has then been designed at a catchment scale, exploring all potential areas to retain floods (Schanze, 2006). Similarly, lateral erosion was considered as a risk that should be controlled by engineering protection and is currently more positively perceived. Different solutions are considered to manage lateral erosion, including the identification of a corridor within which the river can freely move. This led river managers to define policies for maintaining a low vulnerability level within river corridors (see Piégay et al., 2005; Florsheim et al., 2008). Such revision in the spatial scale of management has been matched by the adoption of longer temporal scales. For example, the design of an erodible corridor needs a good understanding of the potential channel dynamics. Historical channel shifts are often assessed from a set of channel positions observed every 5 to 10 years in sequential aerial photos to determine the type, direction, kinetics and trends of lateral erosion (e.g., acceleration, deceleration), in order to propose sustainable future conditions inferred from past trends.