A whole-landscape approach is critical to ensuring conservation and enhancement of biodiversity in farmed landscapes. Although existing agri-environmental schemes are constrained by property boundaries and voluntary take up, the potential for adopting a whole-landscape approach to planned countryside management is currently favoured by a number of factors. These include economic uncertainty in some agricultural sectors; the introduction of a reformulated rural development policy; increased understanding of relationships between biodiversity and management; and the introduction of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology that allows future landscapes to be visualized by stakeholders. Ecological and socio-economic aspects of whole-landscape planning in a study covering 31 neighbouring farms in west Oxfordshire are reported. A baseline was first compiled that included information on: property boundaries; land cover; relationships between hedge and field margin management and key taxa; and farmer soc...