Manipulating geospatial data with Cartopy

In this recipe, we will show how to load and display geographical data in the Shapefile format. Specifically, we will use data from Natural Earth (http://www.naturalearthdata.com) to display the countries of Africa, color coded with their population and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This type of graph is called a choropleth map.

Shapefile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapefile) is a popular geospatial vector data format for GIS software. It can be read by Cartopy, a GIS package in Python.

Getting ready

You need Cartopy, available at http://scitools.org.uk/cartopy/. You can install it with conda install -c conda-forge cartopy.

How to do it...

1. Let's import the packages:

   >>> import io
       import requests
       import zipfile
       import numpy as np
       import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
       import matplotlib.collections as col
       from matplotlib.colors import Normalize
       import cartopy.crs as ccrs
       from cartopy.feature import ShapelyFeature...