Assessment of the visual impacts of land-use changes is often neglected in
the planning of agriculture and forestry. This study presents an approach f
or management planning, when landscape value is a parallel goal with numeri
cal variables such as income. In this study, planning is based on the goals
of both landowners and other interested groups. The importance of differen
t goals and the utility of alternative plans are evaluated using the analyt
ic hierarchy process (AHP). Two-stage planning is used to produce separate
management alternatives for each farm at the first stage and further for th
e whole planning area. The first stage guarantees the feasibility of altern
ative plans at the farm level and the second combines alternatives in an ac
ceptable way at the areal level. The near-view scene is assessed from numer
ical values and the distant-view scene from graphical visualizations. The f
easibility of the planning approach is illustrated with a case study. In th
e future, more work is needed to develop indices for describing landscape n
umerically based on human preferences.