Product Lead · CTrees

Chris Mihiar

Bridging forest research and product. I lead customer-facing data and API products at CTrees — turning the world's best forest science into something usable.

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Current Focus

Where my product and research energy is concentrated right now

Forest Data Products

Leading customer-facing data and API products at CTrees that put global forest monitoring into the hands of buyers, builders, and analysts.

Natural Capital Accounting

Methodologies to measure and integrate the value of natural resources into national economic accounts.

Land-Use Change Modeling

Projecting how climate and economic factors drive transitions between forest, agriculture, and development.

Climate Adaptation Economics

The economic dimensions of climate adaptation, particularly in forestry and land management.

Featured Work

Highlights from my research and tools

Journal Article Featured

Evaluating the Current Status of Agriculture-driven Deforestation Across Jurisdictional Scales in the United States Using Foundational, Federal Datasets

Katherine M. Renwick, Christopher W. Woodall, Christopher Mihiar, Lori T. Murray, Ricky Lewis, Peter C. Beeson • Environmental Research Letters • 2025

Quantifies agriculture-driven deforestation across US jurisdictions using federal datasets, providing a framework for monitoring forest-to-agriculture conversion at multiple scales.

Working Paper Featured

Toward a Timber Asset Account for the United States: A Pilot Account for Georgia

Sonia R. Bruck, Christopher Mihiar, Bin Mei, Thomas Brandeis, Matthew Chambers, Julie L. Hass, Scott Wentland, Travis Warziniack • Under review at Land Economics • 2025

Develops a timber asset account for Georgia using a novel discount timber price method to value standing timber stocks, estimating total timber assets at $5.9 billion including $244 million in pre-merchantable timber.

Open Source Tool

pyFIA: Python Tools for Forest Inventory Analysis

Streamlines access to and analysis of USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data.

Learn More → GitHub

AI-Powered Tool

askFIA: Natural Language Forest Data

AI-powered interface for querying USDA Forest Service FIA data. Ask questions in plain English, get forest answers -- powered by pyFIA and Claude.

Learn More →

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About My Work

I'm Product Lead at CTrees, where I work across the org on customer-facing data and API products that bring global forest monitoring to climate teams, registries, and researchers. Before CTrees, I spent years as a research economist at the USDA Forest Service building the models, datasets, and tools behind that work — experience that now shapes how I lead product.

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