Interactive Maps with Folium

Introduction

Understanding and interpreting geographic data is a vital aspect of modern data science, and this task often involves producing interactive maps. The ability to present and explore data within a spatial context significantly enhances comprehension and facilitates effective decision-making. This is why interactive maps are not just visually compelling, but are a critical tool for converting geospatial data into actionable insights.

The production of interactive maps, however, requires specialized tools. This is where the Folium package, comes into play. Folium is a powerful and flexible tool that helps data scientists and GIS professionals create dynamic and interactive maps, combining the data manipulation strengths of Python with the mapping strengths of the Leaflet library.

Note: Leaflet is an open-source JavaScript library to create interactive, mobile-friendly maps, and it is extensively used in numerous web-GIS applications due to its simplicity and performance.

Folium allows users to manipulate data in Python, and then visualize it on an interactive Leaflet map via a seamless integration. It accomplishes this by bridging the gap between Python and Leaflet, translating Python code into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create rich, interactive visualizations. This is particularly helpful, as Leaflet is one of the most well-regarded libraries when it comes to creating interactive maps, but it operates primarily in JavaScript.

This lesson is not intended to be a full Folium course, but a quick introduction to its basic usage and capabilities and how we can integrate it with our GeoPandas datasets.

Creating a basic Folium map

Creating an interactive map with Folium is pretty straightforward. Basically, what we need is to create a ...