ANN: GeoPandas 0.3.0 released

[Joris Van den Bossche]

We are pleased to announce a new release of GeoPandas!

Most notably, GeoPandas 0.3.0 improves the plotting performance considerably (3x to 20x depending on the geometry type), and now follows the new matplotlib defaults. This may impact your figures and how you have to tweak them. Feedback welcome!

A full list of improvements and bug fixes can be found below.

GeoPandas can be installed with conda from the conda-forge channel (conda install -c conda-forge geopandas) or with pip assuming the dependecies are available (pip install geopandas).

Please report any issues, or request new features via our GitHub repository: https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/issues

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 shapely geometries. GeoPandas enables you to easily do operations in python that would otherwise require a spatial database such as PostGIS.

Documentation can be found here: http://geopandas.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

What's new?

Improvements:

• Improve plotting performance using matplotlib.collections (#267)
• Improve default plotting appearance. The defaults now follow the new matplotlib defaults (#318, #502, #510)
• Provide access to x/y coordinates as attributes for Point GeoSeries (#383)
• Make the NYBB dataset available through geopandas.datasets (#384)
• Enable sjoin on non-integer-index GeoDataFrames (#422)
• Add cx indexer to GeoDataFrame (#482)
• GeoDataFrame.from_features now also accepts a Feature Collection (#225, #507)
• Use index label instead of integer id in output of iterfeatures and
  to_json (#421)
• Return empty data frame rather than raising an error when performing a spatial join with non overlapping geodataframes (#335)

Bug fixes:

• Compatibility with shapely 1.6.0 (#512)
• Fix fiona.filter results when bbox is not None (#372)
• Fix dissolve to retain CRS (#389)
• Fix cx behavior when using index of 0 (#478)
• Fix display of lower bin in legend label of choropleth plots using a PySAL scheme (#450)

Acknowledgments

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

- abjer
- Aleksey Bilogur
- Chris Holdgraf
- Emilio Mayorga
- Ezequiel Alvarez
- James McBride
- Jeffrey Gerard
- Joris Van den Bossche
- Micah Cochran
- mlyons-tcc
- Nick Grue
- nickwg03
- Sean Gillies
- Tim Tröndle
- Zhanzhao (Deo) Liang

-- The GeoPandas developers