ANN: GeoPandas 0.2 released

[Joris Van den Bossche]

We are happy to announce the release of GeoPandas 0.2. 

It is a major release, accumulating work of the past two years. Thanks to Kelsey Kjordhal for the release, and to all the contributors for making this release possible.

See the revamped documentation: http://geopandas.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

If you are using Anaconda/miniconda, you can install it with conda from the conda-forge channel:

        conda install -c conda-forge geopandas

Alternatively, you can also install it with pip (assuming the dependencies are installed):

        pip install geopandas

What is it?
========

GeoPandas is an open source project to make working with geospatial data in python easier. GeoPandas combines the capabilities of pandas and shapely, providing geospatial operations in pandas and a high-level interface to multiple geometries to shapely. GeoPandas enables you to easily do operations in python that would otherwise require a spatial database such as PostGIS.

What is new?
==========

Improvements:

* Complete overhaul of the documentation
* Addition of ``overlay`` to perform spatial overlays with polygons (#142)
* Addition of ``sjoin`` to perform spatial joins (#115, #145, #188)
* Addition of ``__geo_interface__`` that returns a python data structure
  to represent the ``GeoSeries`` as a GeoJSON-like ``FeatureCollection`` (#116)
  and ``iterfeatures`` method (#178)
* Addition of the ``explode`` (#146) and ``dissolve`` (#310, #311) methods.
* Addition of the ``sindex`` attribute, a Spatial Index using the optional
  dependency ``rtree`` (``libspatialindex``) that can be used to speed up
  certain operations such as overlays (#140, #141).
* Addition of the ``GeoSeries.ix`` coordinate indexer to slice a GeoSeries based
  on a bounding box of the coordinates (#55).
* Improvements to plotting: ability to specify edge colors (#173), support for
  the ``vmin``, ``vmax``, ``figsize``, ``linewidth`` keywords (#207), legends
  for chloropleth plots (#210), color points by specifying a colormap (#186) or
  a single color (#238).
* Larger flexibility of ``to_crs``, accepting both dicts and proj strings (#289)
* Addition of embedded example data, accessible through
  ``geopandas.datasets.get_path``.

API changes:

* In the ``plot`` method, the ``axes`` keyword is renamed to ``ax`` for
  consistency with pandas, and the ``colormap`` keyword is renamed to ``cmap``
  for consistency with matplotlib (#208, #228, #240).

Bug fixes:

* Properly handle rows with missing geometries (#139, #193).
* Fix ``GeoSeries.to_json`` (#263).
* Correctly serialize metadata when pickling (#199, #206).
* Fix ``merge`` and ``concat`` to return correct GeoDataFrame (#247, #320, #322).

Acknowledgments 

=============

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release! In alphabetical order:

  Adam Greenhall

  Dani Arribas-Bel

  Jacob Wasserman

  James McBride

  Jeffrey Gerard

  Joris Van den Bossche

  Kelsey Jordahl

  Luke

  Matthew Bartos

  Matthew Perry

  Maximilian Albert

  Micah Cochran

  Sean Gillies

  Shaun Walbridge

Please report any issues, or request new features via our GitHub repository:

  https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/issues

-- The GeoPandas developers

[Joris Van den Bossche]

To my shame, I forgot two contributors.

Special thanks to Nick Eubank for the hard work on the new documentation!

Martin Journois

  Matthew Bartos

  Matthew Perry

  Maximilian Albert

  Micah Cochran

Nick Eubank