Introduction to Map Plotting with GeoPandas

Introduction

Plotting with GeoPandas is based on the Matplotlib library. Matplotlib provides a wide variety of visualization options, and by using it as a foundation, GeoPandas can create intricate maps with relative ease. The relationship between GeoPandas and Matplotlib is symbiotic: GeoPandas handles the geospatial data manipulation (i.e., coordinates, projections, etc.) and Matplotlib handles the actual plotting.

Although Matplotlib provides the foundation for plot rendering, other packages are used in the process. For example, the conversion from Shapely geometries, which are actually stored in a GeoDataFrame, to Matplotlib paths (disconnected segments) and patches (closed 2-D shapes with defined facecolor) is provided by the Descartes package. Moreover, mapclassify is used for the optimal classification of numerical values to ...