Considering that natural environments and healthy aquatic ecosystems can be valuable infrastructures to manage natural hazards and provide water and services in a sustainable perspective, there is an increasing social demand, especially with the implementation of the Water Framework Directive to identify, preserve and restore different river corridors. Because the spatial and temporal scales concerned became wider, the managers must now manage coherent geographical units of a few hundreds of km2 or of a few kilometres of river length and consider pluri-decadal trends in term of geomorphic adjustment and ecosystem evolution, the problem is more than an engineering question inducing territory management issues, public participation and interdisciplinarity discussions. In such context, the aim of this talk is to share experiences of the interdisciplinary scientific team working in Lyon on restoration experiences on the LTER Rhône Basin platform (Zone Atelier Bassin du Rhône) allowing interconnecting scientists and river managers to highlight knowledge needs and formulate fundamental research needed at a medium term for helping practioners in their day-to-day actions. In the geomorphological domain, there are truly challenging issues for planning restoration and preservation strategies at the district scale but also providing feedbacks for improving pioneer restoration actions which have been performed at local scales. A few examples will be used to illustrate the works done in term of planning at the hydrographic network scale (habitat modelling and physical characterisation), monitoring restored sites and predicting evolutions for future design (former channel recreation, minimum flow increase, sediment reintroduction), but also providing thinking and knowledge for diagnosing the ecological alteration, assessing good ecological quality of gravel-bed rivers, evaluating their self-restoration capacity. Discussion points will be introduced in term of possible limitations of such evolution and the urgent need to better integrate local community wish and social questions in the restoration projects (elements on landscape/aesthetics perception; balancing natural hazard mitigation and ecosystem improvements).