Geospatial intern focuses skills on analyzing mountaintop mining impacts and developing software for 30×30
Driven by firsthand climate change impacts, Olivia Zhang turns geospatial data into action for environmental conservation
“I’m like a moth to a flame when it comes to GIS.”
That’s how Olivia Zhang describes being drawn to her work with data. A SkyTruth geospatial intern since September 2025, Zhang puts that passion into visualizing and analyzing spatial data using GIS, which is shorthand for Geographic Information Systems–technology used to create, manage, analyze, and map a wide variety of data.
As part of her internship at SkyTruth, she performs elevation analysis to reveal the true impacts of mountaintop mining, works on our 30×30 Progress Tracker, managing the automatic monthly data sync for its conservation builder function, and has verified over 300 oil slicks for Cerulean, our ocean oil pollution monitoring tool.
Witness to Climate Change
Zhang was born in New Orleans just a few months before storm surge from Hurricane Katrina flooded her family’s home. Her father’s job as a marine surveyor required her family to stay close to the ocean, causing them to relocate to South Florida, where hurricanes were even more common. As a result, she developed an interest in using data to support meaningful climate action, leading her to study geography, data science, and geospatial AI at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
She learned about SkyTruth when she read a blog post by a former communications intern, which inspired her to apply. She juggles her SkyTruth internship with other geospatial work, from mapping wildfires to supporting youth GIS education programs. On top of that, she’s a talented artist, graphic designer, and game maker, and she often integrates her love for data into her art.
Digital artwork by Olivia Zhang that shows her self-portrait overlaid with a series of colored lines depicting sea level rise and a time-lapse of sea level rise over a satellite image.
Mountaintop Mining Analysis
Zhang’s internship with SkyTruth started with data analysis on mountaintop mining, a destructive mining technique that uses explosives to reveal coal seams by blasting apart ridge tops. She compared historical and contemporary elevation data to determine changes in elevation before and after mountaintop mining.
A large portion of this work is data processing. “The pre-mining data has some errors because it uses a patchwork of different data collection methods,” Zhang explained. “Sometimes, there might be two pixels right next to each other, and the elevation is very different.”
She worked closely with SkyTruth geospatial scientist Alana Lutz and geospatial engineer Christian Thomas to clean up the data, building off the work of a previous geospatial intern, Jack Genoways.
“Basically, we’re fixing the elevation errors in the data so that when we do the calculations, we know that it’s from mining, and not just the error differences in the data,” Zhang said. “There was so much data processing that we had to do! A lot of making sure that it’s correct before analyzing the data.”
For Zhang, the most important skill she learned from the mountaintop mining work was formatting complex geospatial data clearly, since the purpose of the project was to share the data for communities, regulators, researchers, and advocates to use.
“In my data science coursework, I’m often focused on working with the data itself, and I’m very deep in the data,” she explained. “With mountaintop mining, I have a clear understanding of the bigger picture, the problems that we’re analyzing, and how our work at SkyTruth connects with all of that. And it’s so meaningful to be a part of a project where I know that the data analysis is being turned into impact.”
30×30 Progress Tracker Development
Her work on SkyTruth’s 30×30 Progress Tracker focuses more on the back-end infrastructure of the tool. One function of the tracker is called the conservation builder, which helps users design and visualize potential new protected areas. Working closely with senior software engineer Will Lytle and geospatial data scientist Suzy Stillman, Zhang updated the function to automatically sync its data monthly.
The difference that her code made in the conservation builder was remarkable. By the time she completed the work, the terrestrial conservation data loaded up to eight times faster, and marine data was even quicker, at 13 times faster.
“Her work has been incredibly valuable and has made the conservation builder a more useful tool for the users while also making it easier to maintain and improve,” said Lytle.
Operation efficiency and storage space, before and after the update Zhang made to the conservation builder function in the 30×30 Progress Tracker.
Through her work on the 30×30 Progress Tracker, Zhang is gaining software development skills applicable to making tools accessible to anyone on the internet. “I learned so much about data pipelines and processing, and making things accessible on a website,” she said. “I was able to help with data processing in the cloud, where the data is not just on my own computer. It’s going to be on this website that anyone can access.”
Integrating SkyTruth into Life
Zhang’s work at SkyTruth lies at the intersection of her interests: GIS, data analysis, communication, and impact, making it a perfect fit for her. “I’m very grateful to be working at such an innovative organization,” she said. “Everyone on the team has been so kind and open to sharing their experience or advice, which has been so helpful for me to better understand how I can grow professionally.”
The internship represents an avenue of learning that her schoolwork doesn’t fully provide. “Working on real-world projects as an intern is so special,” she said. “I can apply what I learned from coursework to projects that I’m deeply passionate about at SkyTruth, while learning many new skills.”
She said the most helpful part of her internship has been the flexibility provided by the SkyTruth team and the ability to work on projects that interest her. Zhang has also had the chance to meet many members of the SkyTruth team in person, which is unusual for most interns, since the organization is fully remote. “I’ve been able to meet a lot of the team in person, through various events that I’ve traveled to across the U.S.,” she explained. “Through that, I feel like I’ve been able to connect with a lot of the team and learn from them.”
Zhang has been able to meet up with other members of the SkyTruth team at events and conferences across the country.
She balances her SkyTruth internship with her education by scheduling her meetings between classes, helping out with smaller projects throughout the day, and working on longer blocks of work in the evening. When she isn’t working on a larger project, she focuses on slick review and verification for Cerulean.
“Everything I do at SkyTruth is pretty much exactly what I envision doing as a career,” Zhang said. “I gained so many useful skills in GIS from mountaintop mining analysis, and geospatial software from 30×30…I think that our work at SkyTruth is so meaningful in that everything gets shared, and it’s made for anyone to use for free.”
