Packages for working with geospatial data
There are many packages that enable you to work with geospatial data in Python. In this section, we’ll discuss some of the most common packages that you’ll interact with during the course of common geospatial data science workflows.
GeoPandas
As we mentioned in the prior chapter, GeoPandas is an extension of pandas, which adds support for additional data types necessary for working with spatial data. It also includes additional methods not found in pandas, which enable you to perform spatial operations and produce spatial data visualizations. We’ll discuss pandas later on in this chapter in the Reviewing foundational data science packages section. pandas is a foundational package required for most general data science workflows.
The core functionality of GeoPandas includes the following:
- Reading and writing spatial data
- Spatial data structures
- Projection management
- Spatial data visualization...
