Starting in GIS: A beginners tale

Okay, maybe like myself you want to learn GIS, to show geographic visuals of your data analysis. If you are familiar with Python then the 2 libraries Geopandas and Folium are invaluable resources.

GeoPandas is an open-source Python library designed for easy geospatial data manipulation and analysis. Integrating with the popular Python, Pandas library, it extends its capabilities allowing for the manipulation of geographic data, making it an essential tool in the field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). GeoPandas enables coders to work with geospatial data in Python with ease, offering functionality to read and write a variety of spatial file formats, including Shapefile, GeoJSON, and KML.

At the core of GeoPandas is the GeoDataFrame, an extension of the Pandas’ DataFrame, which is used to store tabular data but with an additional column for geometric data. This geometric data can represent points, lines, polygons, and multipolygons, which are essential for spatial analysis. GeoPandas leverages the capabilities of several other libraries, including Fiona for file access, Shapely for geometric operations, and Pyproj for projection transformations and geodetic computations.

With GeoPandas, users can perform a wide range of spatial operations like spatial joins, overlay, and calculating areas, distances, and buffers. It also integrates well with other Python libraries for data analysis and visualization, such as Matplotlib for plotting, and can be used alongside libraries like Folium for creating…