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Geographical design of riparian buffers with long-term vegetation cover for environmental restoration in agricultural watersheds needs to assess how much farmland is located in the buffers of a concerned watershed. Traditionally, this assessment was done by field surveying and manual mapping, which was a time-consuming and costly process for a large region. In this paper, remote sensing (RS) and geographical information system (GIS) as cost-effective techniques were used to develop a catchments-based approach for identifying critical sites of agricultural riparian buffer restoration. The method was explained through a case study of watershed with 11 catchments and results showed that only four of the catchments were eligible in terms of higher priority for riparian buffer restoration. This research has methodological contributions to the spatial assessment of farming intensities in catchments-based riparian buffers across a watershed and to the geographical designs of variable buffering scenarios within catchments. The former makes the catchments-based management strategy possible, and the latter provides alternative restoration scenarios to meet different management purposes, both of which have direct implementations to the environmental restoration of riparian buffers in the real world. This study, thus, highlights the great potential of RS and GIS applications to the planning and management of riparian buffer restoration in agricultural watersheds.