Will Lytle is a Senior Software Engineer at SkyTruth, where he transforms complex environmental data into accessible web applications. But his path to tech was anything but conventional — involving 13 years guiding students through the Grand Canyon, endangered fish research, and a pandemic-era career pivot. We sat down with Will to learn about his unique journey and current work at SkyTruth.

You’ve been at SkyTruth for nine months now. What’s your role here?

I’m a Senior Software Engineer, which means I put SkyTruth’s science and tools onto the Internet and into the hands of users. I work mostly on 30×30 and Monitor, two of our main platforms.

Let’s talk about your path to SkyTruth. You didn’t take the traditional route to software engineering.

Not at all. I got to this point in my career sideways and backwards. I have degrees in geophysics and hydrometeorology, but I spent 13 years in outdoor education. My bread and butter was taking high school students on multi-week rafting trips in the Grand Canyon on field science projects.

As I was getting ready to shift toward a career that was more rooted in place — not being gone all the time — the pandemic hit. I call it “pandemic retired” because the work sort of went away. So I learned how to be a software engineer, using some coding skills I had from grad school.

What was your first software job like?

My first software job was at Nordstrom, which was a cool job, but not where my interests are, which are in environmental education. It’s hard to stare at a computer screen all day if it’s not something you personally care about. So I started looking for ways to take my science education background and put those skills toward something I was more passionate about.

That led you to work on groundwater modeling at the University of Arizona before SkyTruth?

Exactly. I was working with a hydrology professor, making a mapping web application that showed national groundwater and high-speed groundwater modeling. This is a very complicated process that usually uses supercomputers, and we were trying to make it push-button to get model results, which was pretty cool.

Can you tell us about what you’re doing with SkyTruth’s 30×30 Progress Tracker?

We’re working on something really exciting right now. Currently, when you use the Tracker, you can click on any country and see data rolled up by sovereignty. We’re working to break that out into more territorial locations, which means going back to our original data sources and finding where those boundary lines actually are.

I’ve done a lot of science stuff, but as soon as you add geopolitics, it really ratchets up the level of complexity! It’s been a fun challenge. We’re essentially redefining what we call a “country” in the application and regenerating all the statistics and map layers to reflect that.

Why would users want custom regions instead of standard country data?

Many of our stakeholders know that each country is an arbitrary boundary when you’re thinking about ecosystems. There’s particular interest in places like the Caribbean and Mediterranean — these bodies of water with lots of interconnected land and water that are ecologically intertwined.

At the end of this project, you’ll be able to select a self-defined region, such as Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and each of the countries in the Caribbean to get a holistic report. When things are rolled up into sovereignty, you get weird situations like the Bahamas being part of the United Kingdom — which may be legally true, but when you’re looking at Caribbean ecosystems, you don’t really care about England’s waters.

What about your work with Monitor?

Monitor is fascinating — it’s been around for years and is like a one-stop shop for satellite and mapping data. Right now I’m doing a lot of maintenance and modernization, moving it from older systems to keep it stable for the future.

But the really cool part is working with Bjorn Bergman, one of our project managers. He has established excellent partnerships with groups in South America — small organizations doing really important geospatial tracking of things like mining and deforestation on Indigenous lands. We regularly integrate their data into the platform. They have the data because they’re in the impacted communities, but they don’t have ways to integrate it with other data or share it widely.

What do you enjoy most about this work?

I love that the stuff we build is usable. We’re actively working with conservation communities, government agencies, and NGOs, building tools that people want and have real use cases for. I worked in academia before, and there’s cool cutting-edge research happening there, but the goal is usually a published paper. Here, we’re asked to push and develop new knowledge that’s grounded in what’s usable, and we have a system for distributing it. It feels impactful. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.

You mentioned sitting in on user interviews early in your time at SkyTruth. What was that like?

Kris Moreau, our product manager, was doing interviews about Cerulean with people from places like the Pulitzer Center — working on really interesting investigations. Hearing how they were using our tools to publish reports and impact legislation… that was eye-opening. When I’m behind my computer for eight hours a day staring at numbers and code, it’s amazing to know that on the other end, that work is percolating into something meaningful.

Let’s go back to your Grand Canyon days. Can you share a story that shaped your perspective as an environmental educator?

For several years, I led students on trips working with fish biologists studying native fish species in the Colorado River. There’s an endangered species called the humpback chub — it’s this goofy-looking fish with a big hump on its back. They’re super endangered but also really charismatic. If you’re eating a sandwich over the river and drop some bread, they’ll come up and eat it and nibble on your toes!

We’d put out hoop nets overnight — a passive, non-harmful way to catch fish. The students would set the nets, measure the fish, and record the data. Some of these kids had never been away from concrete, so to see them experience the joy of finding an endangered fish in this age where everything is cell phones… You give the fish a kiss because you’re so happy about it.

The care and connection to places that can happen is incredible. Several people I worked with — kids I took rafting when they were 12 or 13 — are now river guides, scientists, or public land advocates. It feels like a gift I was given that I’ve been able to give to others. Connection to place really makes advocates, whether you’re out there as a biologist or sitting in front of a computer developing tools for those people.

You’ve been in Tucson for 19 years now. What keeps you there?

I came here for college and fell in love with the Sonoran Desert: the culture, the people, the plants, the harshness of it. I’m very rooted in the desert now.

What’s it like working for an organization like SkyTruth?

The work is super fun because it takes all these different parts of what I’ve learned throughout my career — science, software, community — and puts them together in this really interesting way. It’s constantly challenging because we’re working on problems that haven’t been solved before.

We make stuff to give away for free, which feels like a kind of wonderland sometimes. It’s really nice to have smart people working in a model that’s not profit-driven. Nobody ever mentions shareholder value, and that’s pretty rad.

Will Lytle is a Senior Software Engineer at SkyTruth. When he’s not coding, you can find him riding bikes, canyoneering, playing with his dogs, and patiently waiting for enough rain to go packrafting in the Arizona desert.