Landscape in farm-scale land-use planning

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.