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 for management planning, when landscape value is a parallel goal with numerical variables such as income. In this study, planning is based on the goals of both landowners and other interested groups. The importance of different goals and the utility of alternative plans are evaluated using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Two-stage planning is used to produce separate management alternatives for each farm at the first stage and further for the whole planning area. The first stage guarantees the feasibility of alternative plans at the farm level and the second combines alternatives in an acceptable way at the areal level. The near-view scene is assessed from numerical values and the distant-view scene from graphical visualizations. The feasibility of the planning approach is illustrated with a case study. In the future, more work is needed to develop indices for describing landscape numerically based on human preferences.