Current Position
Product Lead
CTrees
Leading customer-facing data and API products across the org — bringing global forest monitoring to climate teams, registries, and researchers.
Previous Positions
Research Economist
USDA Forest Service, Southern Research Station
Research Triangle Park, NC
RPA Land-use Specialist; Team Lead, U.S. Timber Asset Accounting; key contributor to the 2020 RPA Assessment.
Education
Ph.D. Applied Economics
Oregon State University
Dissertation: An Econometric Analysis of the Impact of Climate Change on Forest Land Value and Broad Land-use Change
Advisor: David J. Lewis
Research Interests
- Natural Capital Accounting
- Land-Use Change Economics
- Climate Adaptation Economics
- Forest Economics
- Environmental Valuation
- Applied Econometrics
First-Author Publications
Mihiar, C., Brandeis, T., Bruck, S., Hass, J.L., Wentland, S., Mei, R. & Warziniack, T. (2025). Timber valuation from forestry microdata: Lessons from developing a pilot timber asset account for the US.
View details →Mihiar, C., Lewis, D.J. & Coulston, J.W. (2023). County-level land-use projections for the conterminous United States, 2020–2070, used in the 2020 RPA Assessment.
View details →Mihiar, C. & Lewis, D.J. (2023). An empirical analysis of US land-use change under multiple climate change scenarios. Journal of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, 2(3), 597–611.
View details →Mihiar, C. & Lewis, D.J. (2021). Climate, adaptation, and the value of forestland: A national Ricardian analysis of the United States. Land Economics, 97(4), 911–932.
View details →Selected Co-Authored Publications
Caldwell, P.V., Martin, K.L., Vose, J.M., Baker, J.S., Warziniack, T.W., Costanza, J.K., Mihiar, C., et al. (2023). Forested watersheds provide the highest water quality among all land cover types. Science of the Total Environment, 882, 163550.
51 citationsCavender-Bares, J., Nelson, E., Meireles, J.E., Lasky, J.R., Miteva, D.A., Mihiar, C., et al. (2022). The hidden value of trees: Quantifying the ecosystem services of tree lineages. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 1(4), e0000010.
44 citationsBigelow, D.P., Lewis, D.J. & Mihiar, C. (2022). A major shift in U.S. land development avoids significant losses in forest and agricultural land. Environmental Research Letters, 17(2), 024007.
24 citationsMurray, L.T., Woodall, C., Lister, A., Stockmann, K., Gu, H., Urbanski, S., Riley, K., Mihiar, C., et al. (2024). Quantifying greenhouse gas sources and sinks in managed forest systems.
13 citationsRenwick, K.M., Woodall, C.W., Mihiar, C., Murray, L.T., Lewis, R., Beeson, P.C., et al. (2025). Evaluating the current status of agriculture-driven deforestation across jurisdictional scales in the United States. Environmental Research Letters, 20(7), 074002.
3 citationsLeadership & Service
RPA Land-use Specialist
Resources Planning Act Assessment
Team Lead, U.S. Timber Asset Accounting
National accounts integration project
Key Contributor, 2020 RPA Assessment
USDA Forest Service long-range strategic planning for renewable resources
Technical Skills
Programming Languages
Python, R, TypeScript, SQL
Data Engineering
Polars, DuckDB, Apache Arrow, Parquet, Zarr
Geospatial
GDAL, GeoPandas, Google Earth Engine, PostGIS
Web Development
Astro, Next.js, React, Tailwind CSS
AI / ML
LangChain, Claude API, RAG systems
Cloud & Infrastructure
Google Cloud, Git, Docker, PostgreSQL, LaTeX