In high school I was taking and environmentalism class and we had to do a project on an issue impacting our communities. I had recently stumbled across a documentary about dams and their impact on rivers, specifically in the Pacific Northwest. I learned so much in that project that I never knew about how dams are painted as "green" energy but are really incredibly impactful to the environment. Ever since then I have been fascinated by dam removal projects and the problem of dams in this country. I wanted to make a simple map after graduating college and taking the summer off from GIS, so I figured starting with this would be fun. I was shocked at how packed full of dams the U.S. is. I chose to vary the color of the dots by height so you can see a second dimension of the data. I love that you can see how although the west coast has fewer dams, they are far taller than the many short dams in the east.