geopandas/geopandas: v0.8.0

Experimental: optional use of PyGEOS to speed up spatial operations (#1155). PyGEOS is a faster alternative for Shapely (being contributed back to a future version of Shapely), and is used in element-wise spatial operations and for spatial index in e.g. sjoin (#1343, #1401, #1421, #1427, #1428). See the installation docs for more info and how to enable it.

New features and improvements:

• IO enhancements:
  • New GeoDataFrame.to_postgis() method to write to PostGIS database (#1248).
  • New Apache Parquet and Feather file format support (#1180, #1435)
  • Allow appending to files with GeoDataFrame.to_file (#1229).
  • Add support for the ignore_geometry keyword in read_file to only read the attribute data. If set to True, a pandas DataFrame without geometry is returned (#1383).
  • geopandas.read_file now supports reading from file-like objects (#1329).
  • GeoDataFrame.to_file now supports specifying the CRS to write to the file (#802). By default it still uses the CRS of the GeoDataFrame.
  • New chunksize keyword in geopandas.read_postgis to read a query in chunks (#1123).
• Improvements related to geometry columns and CRS:
  • Any column of the GeoDataFrame that has a "geometry" dtype is now returned as a GeoSeries. This means that when having multiple geometry columns, not only the "active" geometry column is returned as a GeoSeries, but also accessing another geometry column (gdf["other_geom_column"]) gives a GeoSeries (#1336).
  • Multiple geometry columns in a GeoDataFrame can now each have a different CRS. The global gdf.crs attribute continues to returns the CRS of the "active" geometry column. The CRS of other geometry columns can be accessed from the column itself (eg gdf["other_geom_column"].crs) (#1339).
  • New set_crs() method on GeoDataFrame/GeoSeries to set the CRS of naive geometries (#747).
• Improvements related to plotting:
  • The y-axis is now scaled depending on the center of the plot when using a geographic CRS, instead of using an equal aspect ratio (#1290).
  • When passing a column of categorical dtype to the column= keyword of the GeoDataFrame plot(), we now honor all categories and its order (#1483). In addition, a new categories keyword allows to specify all categories and their order otherwise (#1173).
  • For choropleths using a classification scheme (using scheme=), the legend_kwds accept two new keywords to control the formatting of the legend: fmt with a format string for the bin edges (#1253), and labels to pass fully custom class labels (#1302).
• New covers() and covered_by() methods on GeoSeries/GeoDataframe for the equivalent spatial predicates (#1460, #1462).
• GeoPandas now warns when using distance-based methods with data in a geographic projection (#1378).

Deprecations:

• When constructing a GeoSeries or GeoDataFrame from data that already has a CRS, a deprecation warning is raised when both CRS don't match, and in the future an error will be raised in such a case. You can use the new set_crs method to override an existing CRS. See the docs.
• The helper functions in the geopandas.plotting module are deprecated for public usage (#656).
• The geopandas.io functions are deprecated, use the top-level read_file and to_file instead (#1407).
• The set operators (&, |, ^, -) are deprecated, use the intersection(), union(), symmetric_difference(), difference() methods instead (#1255).
• The sindex for empty dataframe will in the future return an empty spatial index instead of None (#1438).
• The objects keyword in the intersection method of the spatial index returned by the sindex attribute is deprecated and will be removed in the future (#1440).

Bug fixes:

• Fix the total_bounds() method to ignore missing and empty geometries (#1312).
• Fix geopandas.clip when masking with non-overlapping area resulting in an empty GeoDataFrame (#1309, #1365).
• Fix error in geopandas.sjoin when joining on an empty geometry column (#1318).
• CRS related fixes: pandas.concat preserves CRS when concatenating GeoSeries objects (#1340), preserve the CRS in geopandas.clip (#1362) and in GeoDataFrame.astype (#1366).
• Fix bug in GeoDataFrame.explode() when 'level_1' is one of the column names (#1445).
• Better error message when rtree is not installed (#1425).
• Fix bug in GeoSeries.equals() (#1451).
• Fix plotting of multi-part geometries with additional style keywords (#1385).

And we now have a Code of Conduct!

GeoPandas 0.8.0 is the last release to support Python 3.5. The next release will require Python 3.6, pandas 0.24, numpy 1.15 and shapely 1.6 or higher.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release! A total of 28 people contributed patches to this release. People with a "+" by their names contributed a patch for the first time.

• Adrian Garcia Badaracco +
• Alan D. Snow
• Bhavika Tekwani +
• Bo-Deng +
• Brendan Ward
• Christopher Yeh +
• Geir Arne Hjelle
• Henrikki Tenkanen +
• Ian Rose
• James McBride
• Joris Van den Bossche
• Julia Signell +
• Kyle Barron +
• Martin Fleischmann
• Martin Jul +
• Mateusz Konieczny +
• Mike Taves
• Oliver Schillinger +
• Rowan Molony +
• Sergio Rey
• SylvainLan +
• TimothyLucas +
• abonte +
• harryposner +
• pietro +
• raphacosta27 +
• rwijtvliet +
• sangarshanan