Python library for easily and quickly creating maps from a shapefile and external data.
One common GIS use case is joining tabular data to a shapefile through a spatial key, then visualizing it on a map. Libraries such as Geopandas make this task relatively simple to do, however they do not offer much styling flexibility and can take a long time (several minutes) to plot larger shapefiles. When you are programmatically creating many maps, this latency can add up quickly, and slow down the entire research process. Additionally, when you are creating maps for use in research papers, having finer control over the map's styling is important.
This library aims to fix these problem by 1.) providing methods that transparently cache the results of intermediate mapping steps to dramatically speed up mapping time, and 2.) providing high level methods that make it easy to quickly perform common mapping tasks.
All of the following examples use the US counties shapefile in examples/cb_2015_us_county_500k_clipped/. This file has been clipped to only include shapes from the continental US. The original data is in examples/cb_2015_us_county_500k and is from the US Census Bureau's "Cartographic Boundary Shapefiles" and can be downloaded here: http://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/GENZ2015/shp/cb_2015_us_county_500k.zip
Higher resolution US county shapefiles can be found here: https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/cbf/cbf_counties.html
The BasemapUtils.py file includes BasemapWrapper() which serves as a drop-in replacement for the Basemap object constructor (from the Basemap library).
BasemapWrapper caches instantiated Basemap objects to file based on the parameters passed to the constructor.
If a previously created Basemap object exists in the cache, then it is loaded from file using cPickle, instead of re-instantiated, which results in a dramatic speed up in the resolution='f' case.
This file also includes PolygonPatchesWrapper() which performs a similar function to BasemapWrapper for lists of matplotlib.shape.Polygon objects loaded from a shapefile. The process of loading all the shapes from a large shapefile and converting all of their coordinates to Basemap figure coordinates (i.e. transformed with the Basemap object) is time consuming. Given a Basemap object, its parameters, and a shapefile, the PolygonPatchesWrapper object will transparently cache exactly this result. This method can be used as a second step in generating custom maps.
Finally, BasemapUtils.py includes serveral accessory functions that make working with spatial libraries easier:
getBounds- Returns the lat/lon bounding box from a shapefile filename.getShapefileColumnHeaders- Returns a list of headers from a shapefile filename.getShapefileColumn- Extracts a column from a shapefile by name. This makes it visualize data in a shapefile.
See demoBasemapWrapper.py. This script will take longer to run the first time, as the full resolution Basemap object is cached to disk. It will run quickly in subsequent executions as reading the cached object from disk is much faster than recalculating it.
(example benchmark times on my machine show an intial runtime of 203 seconds, with subsequent runs taking 8 seconds)
See demoPolygonPatchesWrapper.py. This script demonstrates how the PolygonPatchesWrapper method can be used to map data (random numbers).
See demoExtractingData.py. This script demonstrates how the PolygonPatchesWrapper and getShapefileColumn methods can be used to create an actual map.
To simplify the above steps, we wrap the BasemapWrapper and PolygonPatchesWrapper functionality, along with custom colobar routines into the SimpleFigures.simpleMap() method to make it easy to generate maps from spatial data.
See demoBasemapWrapper.py. The following maps demonstrate different arguments to simpleMap().
See demoBinnedFigures.py. The following maps use the simpleBinnedMap() method.
See demoDifferenceFigures.py. The following maps use the differenceMap() method.
This map uses the 2013 and 2014 American Community Survey 5 year population estimates extracted from the TIGER geodatabases: see https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger-data.html.
We map the log of the 2014 population minus the 2013 population, and start the colorbars at
