New features and improvements:

• GeoDataFrame.to_parquet and read_parquet will now write and read attrs respectively (#3597)
• Add grid_size parameter to union, difference, symmetric_difference and intersection (#3593).
• read_parquet now support direct reading from HTTP/HTTPS protocols (#3699)
• Improved compatibility with pandas 3.0 Copy-on-Write feature, making use of deferred copies where possible (#3298).

Deprecations and compatibility notes:

• The resolution keyword to buffer has been deprecated to align with the convention in shapely, quad_segs should be used instead (#3600).
• Expired deprecations; option use_pygeos which had no functionality, seed keyword in sample_points (replaced by rng) (#3613)

Bug fixes:

• Fix GeoSeries.sample_points not accepting list-like size when generating points using pointpaterns (#3710).

Community:

• GeoPandas now uses the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct.

Notes on dependencies:

• GeoPandas 1.2 now requires Python 3.11 or greater and pandas 2.2, numpy 2.0, pyproj 3.7, and shapely 2.1, are now the minimum required version for these dependencies. Furthermore, the minimum tested version for optional dependencies has been updated to fiona 1.8.21, scipy 1.9, matplotlib 3.9, mapclassify 2.7 folium 0.15, pyarrow 15.0 and SQLAlchemy 2.0. Older versions of these libraries may continue to work, but are no longer considered supported (#3371, #3581).

Bug fixes:

• Fix an issue that caused an error in GeoDataFrame.from_features when there is no properties field (#3599).
• Fix read_file and to_file errors (#3682)
• Fix read_parquet with to_pandas_kwargs for complex (list/struct) arrow types (#3640)
• value_counts on GeoSeries now preserves CRS in index (#3669)
• Fix f-string placeholders appearing in error messages when pyogrio cannot be imported (#3682).
• Fix read_parquet with to_pandas_kwargs for complex (list/struct) arrow types (#3640).
• .to_json now provides a clearer error message when called on a GeoDataFrame without an active geometry column (#3648).
• Calling del gdf["geometry"] now will downcast to a pd.DataFrame if there are no geometry columns left in the dataframe (#3648).
• Fix SQL injection in to_postgis via geometry column name (#3681).

Bug fixes:

• Fix regression in the GeoDataFrame constructor when np.nan is given as an only geometry (#3591).
• Fix regression in overlay with how="identity" when input dataframes have column names that are equal (#3596).

Notes on dependencies:

• GeoPandas 1.1 now requires Python 3.10 or greater and pandas 2.0, numpy 1.24, pyproj 3.5, are now the minimum required version for these dependencies. Furthermore, the minimum tested version for optional dependencies has been updated to fiona 1.8.21, scipy 1.9, matplotlib 3.7, mapclassify 2.5, folium 0.12 and SQLAlchemy 2.0. Older versions of these libraries may continue to work, but are no longer considered supported (#3371).

New features and improvements:

• Added options to return the result of SpatialIndex.query in a form of a dense or a sparse boolean array. This adds optional dependency on scipy for the sparse output. Note that this also changes the previously undocumented behaviour of the output_format keyword (#1674).
• Add grid_size parameter to union_all and dissolve (#3445).
• GeoDataFrame.plot now supports pd.Index as an input for the column keyword (#3463).
• Added disjoint_subset union algorithm for union_all and dissolve (#3534).
• Added constrained_delaunay_triangles method to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3552).
• Added to_pandas_kwargs argument to from_arrow, read_parquet and read_feather to allow better control of conversion of non-geometric Arrow data to DataFrames (#3466).
• Added is_valid_coverage and invalid_coverage_edges to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame to allow validation of polygonal coverage (#3545).
• Added maximum_inscribed_circle method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3544).
• Added minimum_clearance_line method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3543).
• Added orient_polygons method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3559).
• Added method and keep_collapsed argument to make_valid (#3548).
• Added simplify_coverage method for topological simplification of polygonal coverages to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3541).
• Added initial support of M coordinates (m and has_m properties, include_m in get_coordinates) (#3561).
• Added geom_equals_identical method exposing equals_identical from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3560).
• GeoPandas now attempts to use a range request when reading from an URL even if the header does not directly indicate its support (#3572).
• Added geopandas.accessors module. Import this module to register a pandas.Series.geo accessor, which exposes GeoSeries methods via pandas's extension mechanism (#3272).
• Improve performance of overlay with how=identity (#3504).
• A warning message is raised in read_file when a GeoDataFrame or GeoSeries mask and/or the source dataset is missing a defined CRS (#3464).
• GeoDataFrame no longer hard-codes the class internally, allowing easier subclassing (#3505).

Bug fixes:

• Fix an issue that showed numpy dtypes in bbox in to_geo_dict and __geo_interface__. (#3436).
• Fix an issue in sample_points that could occasionally result in non-uniform distribution (#3470).
• Fix unspecified layer warning being emitted while reading multilayer datasets, even when layer is specified when using the mask or bbox keywords (#3378).
• Properly support named aggregations over a geometry column in GroupBy.agg (#3368).
• Support GeoDataFrame constructor receiving arguments to geometry which are not (Geo)Series, but instead should be interpreted as column names, like Enums (#3384).
• Fix regression where constructing a GeoSeries from a pd.Series with GeometryDtype values failed when crs was provided (#3383).
• Fix regression where overlay with keep_geom_type returns wrong results if the input contains invalid geometries (#3395).
• Fix the dtype of the GeometryArray backing data being incorrect for zero length GeoDataFrames causing errors in overlay (#3424).
• Fix regression where constructing a GeoSeries from a pd.Series with GeometryDtype values failed when crs was provided (#3383).
• Fix plotting of polygons with holes by normalizing the coordinate order prior to plotting (#3483).
• Fix an issue in plotting when polygon patches were not closed (#3576).
• Fix ambiguous error when GeoDataFrame is initialised with a column called "crs" (#3502).
• Avoid change of the plot aspect when plotting missing values (#3438).

Deprecations and compatibility notes:

• The GeoSeries.select method wrapping the pandas Series.select method has been removed. The upstream method no longer exists in all supported version of pandas (#3394).
• The deprecated geom_almost_equals method has been removed. Use geom_equals_exact instead (#3522).

Bug fixes:

• Support a named datetime or object dtype index in explore() (#3360, #3364).
• Fix a regression preventing a Series as an argument for geometric methods (#3363).

Notes on dependencies:

• GeoPandas 1.0 drops support for shapely<2 and PyGEOS. The only geometry engine that is currently supported is shapely >= 2. As a consequence, spatial indexing based on the rtree package has also been removed (#3035).
• The I/O engine now defaults to Pyogrio which is now installed with GeoPandas instead of Fiona (#3223).

New methods:

• Added count_geometries method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3154).
• Added count_interior_rings method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3154).
• Added relate_pattern method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3211).
• Added intersection_all method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3228).
• Added line_merge method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3214).
• Added set_precision and get_precision methods from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3175).
• Added count_coordinates method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3026).
• Added minimum_clearance method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#2989).
• Added shared_paths method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3215).
• Added is_ccw method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3027).
• Added is_closed attribute from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3092).
• Added force_2d and force_3d methods from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3090).
• Added voronoi_polygons method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3177).
• Added contains_properly method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3105).
• Added build_area method exposing build_area shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3202).
• Added snap method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3086).
• Added transform method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3075).
• Added get_geometry method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3287).
• Added dwithin method to check for a "distance within" predicate on GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3153).
• Added to_geo_dict method to generate GeoJSON-like dictionary from a GeoDataFrame (#3132).
• Added polygonize method exposing both polygonize and polygonize_full from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#2963).
• Added is_valid_reason method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#3176).
• Added to_arrow method and from_arrow class method to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame to export and import to/from Arrow data with GeoArrow extension types (#3219, #3301).

New features and improvements:

• Added predicate="dwithin" option and distance argument to the sindex.query() method and sjoin (#2882).
• GeoSeries and GeoDataFrame __repr__ now trims trailing zeros for a more readable output (#3087).
• Add on_invalid parameter to from_wkt and from_wkb (#3110).
• make_valid option in overlay now uses the make_valid method instead of buffer(0) (#3113).
• Passing "geometry" as dtype to pd.read_csv will now return a GeoSeries for the specified columns (#3101).
• Added support to read_file for the mask keyword for the pyogrio engine (#3062).
• Added support to read_file for the columns keyword for the fiona engine (#3133).
• Added support to to_parquet and read_parquet for writing and reading files using the GeoArrow-based native geometry encoding of GeoParquet 1.1 (#3253, #3275).
• Add sort keyword to clip method for GeoSeries and GeoDataFrame to allow optional preservation of the original order of observations (#3233).
• Added show_bbox, drop_id and to_wgs84 arguments to allow further customization of GeoSeries.to_json (#3226).
• explore now supports GeoDataFrames with additional columns containing datetimes, uuids and other non JSON serializable objects (#3261).
• The GeoSeries.fillna method now supports the limit keyword (#3290).
• Added on_attribute option argument to the sjoin() method, allowing to restrict joins to the observations with matching attributes (#3231).
• Added support for bbox covering encoding in geoparquet. Can filter reading of parquet files based on a bounding box, and write out a bounding box column to parquet files (#3282).
• align keyword in binary methods now defaults to None, treated as True. Explicit True will silence the warning about mismatched indices (#3212).
• GeoSeries.set_crs can now be used to remove CRS information by passing crs=None, allow_override=True (#3316).
• Added autolim keyword argument to GeoSeries.plot() and GeoDataFrame.plot() (#2817).
• Added metadata parameter to GeoDataFrame.to_file (#2850).
• Updated documentation to clarify that passing a named (Geo)Series as the geometry argument to the GeoDataFrame constructor will not use the name but will always produce a GeoDataFrame with an active geometry column named "geometry" (#3337).
• read_postgis will query the spatial_ref_sys table to determine the CRS authority instead of its current behaviour of assuming EPSG. In the event the spiatal_ref_sys table is not present, or the SRID is not present, read_postgis will fallback on assuming EPSG CRS authority (#3329).
• Added GeoDataFrame.active_geometry_name property returning the active geometry column's name or None if no active geometry column is set (#2943).

Backwards incompatible API changes:

• The sjoin method will now preserve the name of the index of the right GeoDataFrame, if it has one, instead of always using "index_right" as the name for the resulting column in the return value (#846, #2144).
• GeoPandas now raises a ValueError when an unaligned Series is passed as a method argument to avoid confusion of whether the automatic alignment happens or not (#3271).
• The deprecated default value of GeoDataFrame/ GeoSeries explode(.., index_parts=True) is now set to false for consistency with pandas (#3174).
• The behaviour of set_geometry has been changed when passed a (Geo)Series ser with a name. The new active geometry column name in this case will be ser.name, if not None, rather than the previous active geometry column name. This means that if the new and old names are different, then both columns will be preserved in the GeoDataFrame. To replicate the previous behaviour, you can instead call gdf.set_geometry(ser.rename(gdf.active_geometry_name)) (#3237). Note that this behaviour change does not affect the GeoDataFrame constructor, passing a named GeoSeries ser to GeoDataFrame(df, geometry=ser) will always produce a GeoDataFrame with a geometry column named "geometry" to preserve backwards compatibility. If you would like to instead propagate the name of ser when constructing a GeoDataFrame, you can instead call df.set_geometry(ser) or GeoDataFrame(df, geometry=ser).rename_geometry(ser.name) (#3337).
• delaunay_triangles now considers all geometries together when creating the Delaunay triangulation instead of performing the operation element-wise. If you want to generate Delaunay triangles for each geometry separately, use shapely.delaunay_triangles instead. (#3273)
• Reading a data source that does not have a geometry field using read_file now returns a Pandas DataFrame instead of a GeoDataFrame with an empty geometry column.

Enforced deprecations:

• The deprecation of geopandas.datasets has been enforced and the module has been removed. New sample datasets are now available in the geodatasets package (#3084).
• Many longstanding deprecated functions, methods and properties have been removed (#3174), (#3190)
  • Removed deprecated functions geopandas.io.read_file, geopandas.io.to_file and geopandas.io.sql.read_postgis. geopandas.read_file, geopandas.read_postgis and the GeoDataFrame/GeoSeries to_file(..) method should be used instead.
  • Removed deprecated GeometryArray.data property, np.asarray(..) or the to_numpy() method should be used instead.
  • Removed deprecated sindex.query_bulk method, using sindex.query instead.
  • Removed deprecated sjoin parameter op, predicate should be supplied instead.
  • Removed deprecated GeoSeries/ GeoDataFrame methods __xor__, __or__, __and__ and __sub__. Instead use methods symmetric_difference, union, intersection and difference respectively.
  • Removed deprecated plotting functions plot_polygon_collection, plot_linestring_collection and plot_point_collection, use the GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame .plot method directly instead.
  • Removed deprecated GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame .plot parameters axes and colormap, instead use ax and cmap respectively.
  • Removed compatibility for specifying the version keyword in to_parquet and to_feather. This keyword will now be passed through to pyarrow and use schema_version to specify the GeoParquet specification version (#3334).

New deprecations:

• unary_union attribute is now deprecated and replaced by the union_all() method (#3007) allowing opting for a faster union algorithm for coverages (#3151).

• The include_fields and ignore_fields keywords in read_file() are deprecated for the default pyogrio engine. Currently those are translated to the columns keyword for backwards compatibility, but you should directly use the columns keyword instead to select which columns to read (#3133).

• The drop keyword in set_geometry has been deprecated, and in future the drop=True behaviour will be removed (#3237). To prepare for this change, you should remove any explicit drop=False calls in your code (the default behaviour already is the same as drop=False). To replicate the previous drop=True behaviour you should replace gdf.set_geometry(new_geo_col, drop=True) with

  geo_col_name = gdf.active_geometry_name
  gdf.set_geometry(new_geo_col).drop(columns=geo_col_name).rename_geometry(geo_col_name)

• The geopandas.use_pygeos option has been deprecated and will be removed in GeoPandas 1.1 (#3283)

• Manual overriding of an existing CRS of a GeoSeries or GeoDataFrame by setting the crs property has been deprecated and will be disabled in future. Use the set_crs() method instead (#3085).

Bug fixes:

• Fix GeoDataFrame.merge() incorrectly returning a DataFrame instead of a GeoDataFrame when the suffixes argument is applied to the active geometry column (#2933).
• Fix bug in GeoDataFrame constructor where if geometry is given a named GeoSeries the name was not used as the active geometry column name (#3237).
• Fix bug in GeoSeries constructor when passing a Series and specifying a crs to not change the original input data (#2492).
• Fix regression preventing reading from file paths containing hashes in read_file with the fiona engine (#3280). An analogous fix for pyogrio is included in pyogrio 0.8.1.
• Fix to_parquet to write correct metadata in case of 3D geometries (#2824).
• Fixes for compatibility with psycopg (#3167).
• Fix to allow appending dataframes with no CRS to PostGIS tables with no CRS (#3328)
• Fix plotting of all-empty GeoSeries using explore (#3316).

• Several fixes for compatibility with the upcoming pandas 3.0, numpy 2.0 and fiona 1.10 releases.

• Several fixes for compatibility with the latest pandas 2.2 release.
• Fix bug in pandas.concat CRS consistency checking where CRS differing by WKT whitespace only were treated as incompatible (#3023).

• Fix regression in overlay where using buffer(0) instead of make_valid internally produced invalid results (#3074).
• Fix explore() method when the active geometry contains missing and empty geometries (#3094).

• The Parquet and Feather IO functions now support the latest 1.0.0 version of the GeoParquet specification (geoparquet.org) (#2663).
• Fix read_parquet and read_feather for CVE-2023-47248 (#3070).

GeoPandas will use Shapely 2.0 by default instead of PyGEOS when both Shapely >= 2.0 and PyGEOS are installed. PyGEOS will continue to be used by default when PyGEOS is installed alongside Shapely < 2.0. Support for PyGEOS and Shapely < 2.0 will be removed in GeoPandas 1.0. (#2999)

API changes:

• seed keyword in sample_points is deprecated. Use rng instead. (#2913).

New methods:

• Added concave_hull method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#2903).
• Added delaunay_triangles method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#2907).
• Added extract_unique_points method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#2915).
• Added frechet_distance() method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#2929).
• Added hausdorff_distance method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#2909).
• Added minimum_rotated_rectangle method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#2541).
• Added offset_curve method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#2902).
• Added remove_repeated_points method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#2940).
• Added reverse method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#2988).
• Added segmentize method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#2910).
• Added shortest_line method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#2960).

New features and improvements:

• Added exclusive parameter to sjoin_nearest method for Shapely >= 2.0 (#2877)
• The to_file() method will now automatically detect the FlatGeoBuf driver for files with the .fgb extension (#2958)

Bug fixes:

• Fix ambiguous error when GeoDataFrame is initialized with a column called "crs" (#2944)
• Fix a color assignment in explore when using UserDefined bins (#2923)
• Fix bug in apply with axis=1 where the given user defined function returns nested data in the geometry column (#2959)
• Properly infer schema for np.int32 and pd.Int32Dtype columns (#2950)
• assert_geodataframe_equal now handles GeoDataFrames with no active geometry (#2498)

Notes on (optional) dependencies:

• GeoPandas 0.14 drops support for Python 3.8 and pandas 1.3 and below (the minimum supported pandas version is now 1.4). Further, the minimum required versions for the listed dependencies have now changed to shapely 1.8.0, fiona 1.8.21, pyproj 3.3.0 and matplotlib 3.5.0 (#3001)

Deprecations and compatibility notes:

• geom_almost_equals() methods have been deprecated and geom_equals_exact() should be used instead (#2604).

Bug fix:

• Fix a regression in reading from local file URIs (file://..) using geopandas.read_file (#2948).

Bug fix:

• Fix a regression in reading from URLs using geopandas.read_file (#2908). This restores the behaviour to download all data up-front before passing it to the underlying engine (fiona or pyogrio), except if the server supports partial requests (to support reading a subset of a large file).

New methods:

• Added sample_points method to sample random points from Polygon or LineString geometries (#2860).
• New hilbert_distance() method that calculates the distance along a Hilbert curve for each geometry in a GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#2297).
• Support for sorting geometries (for example, using sort_values()) based on the distance along the Hilbert curve (#2070).
• Added get_coordinates() method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#2624).
• Added minimum_bounding_circle() method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#2621).
• Added minimum_bounding_radius() as GeoSeries method (#2827).

Other new features and improvements:

• The Parquet and Feather IO functions now support the latest 1.0.0-beta.1 version of the GeoParquet specification (<geoparquet.org>) (#2663).
• Added support to fill missing values in GeoSeries.fillna via another GeoSeries (#2535).
• Support specifying min_zoom and max_zoom inside the map_kwds argument for .explore() (#2599).
• Added support for append (mode="a" or append=True) in to_file() using engine="pyogrio" (#2788).
• Added a to_wgs84 keyword to to_json allowing automatic re-projecting to follow the 2016 GeoJSON specification (#416).
• to_json output now includes a "crs" field if the CRS is not the default WGS84 (#1774).
• Improve error messages when accessing the geometry attribute of GeoDataFrame without an active geometry column related to the default name "geometry" being provided in the constructor (#2577)

Deprecations and compatibility notes:

• Added warning that unary_union will return 'GEOMETRYCOLLECTION EMPTY' instead of None for all-None GeoSeries. (#2618)
• The query_bulk() method of the spatial index .sindex property is deprecated in favor of query() (#2823).

Bug fixes:

• Ensure that GeoDataFrame created from DataFrame is a copy, not a view (#2667)
• Fix mismatch between geometries and colors in plot() if an empty or missing geometry is present (#2224)
• Escape special characters to avoid TemplateSyntaxError in explore() (#2657)
• Fix to_parquet/to_feather to not write an invalid bbox (with NaNs) in the metadata in case of an empty GeoDataFrame (#2653)
• Fix to_parquet/to_feather to use correct WKB flavor for 3D geometries (#2654)
• Fix read_file to avoid reading all file bytes prior to calling Fiona or Pyogrio if provided a URL as input (#2796)
• Fix copy() downcasting GeoDataFrames without an active geometry column to a DataFrame (#2775)
• Fix geometry column name propagation when GeoDataFrame columns are a multiindex (#2088)
• Fix iterfeatures() method of GeoDataFrame to correctly handle non-scalar values when na='drop' is specified (#2811)
• Fix issue with passing custom legend labels to plot (#2886)

Notes on (optional) dependencies:

• GeoPandas 0.13 drops support pandas 1.0.5 (the minimum supported pandas version is now 1.1). Further, the minimum required versions for the listed dependencies have now changed to shapely 1.7.1, fiona 1.8.19, pyproj 3.0.1 and matplotlib 3.3.4 (#2655)

Bug fixes:

• Correctly handle geometries with Z dimension in to_crs() when using PyGEOS or Shapely >= 2.0 (previously the z coordinates were lost) (#1345).
• Assign Crimea to Ukraine in the naturalearth_lowres built-in dataset (#2670)

Small bug-fix release removing the shapely<2 pin in the installation requirements.

The highlight of this release is the support for Shapely 2.0. This makes it possible to test Shapely 2.0 (currently 2.0b1) alongside GeoPandas.

Note that if you also have PyGEOS installed, you need to set an environment variable (USE_PYGEOS=0) before importing geopandas to actually test Shapely 2.0 features instead of PyGEOS. See https://geopandas.org/en/latest/getting_started/install.html#using-the-optional-pygeos-dependency for more details.

New features and improvements:

• Added normalize() method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#2537).
• Added make_valid() method from shapely to GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame (#2539).
• Added where filter to read_file (#2552).
• Updated the distributed natural earth datasets (naturalearth_lowres and naturalearth_cities) to version 5.1 (#2555).

Deprecations and compatibility notes:

• Accessing the crs of a GeoDataFrame without active geometry column was deprecated and this now raises an AttributeError (#2578).
• Resolved colormap-related warning in .explore() for recent Matplotlib versions (#2596).

Bug fixes:

• Fix cryptic error message in geopandas.clip() when clipping with an empty geometry (#2589).
• Accessing gdf.geometry where the active geometry column is missing, and a column named "geometry" is present will now raise an AttributeError, rather than returning gdf["geometry"] (#2575).
• Combining GeoSeries/GeoDataFrames with pandas.concat will no longer silently override CRS information if not all inputs have the same CRS (#2056).

Small bug-fix release:

• Fix regression (RecursionError) in reshape methods such as unstack() and pivot() involving MultiIndex, or GeoDataFrame construction with MultiIndex (#2486).
• Fix regression in GeoDataFrame.explode() with non-default geometry column name.
• Fix regression in apply() causing row-wise all nan float columns to be casted to GeometryDtype (#2482).
• Fix a crash in datetime column reading where the file contains mixed timezone offsets (#2479). These will be read as UTC localized values.
• Fix a crash in datetime column reading where the file contains datetimes outside the range supported by [ns] precision (#2505).
• Fix regression in passing the Parquet or Feather format version in to_parquet and to_feather. As a result, the version parameter for the to_parquet and to_feather methods has been replaced with schema_version. version will be passed directly to underlying feather or parquet writer. version will only be used to set schema_version if version is one of 0.1.0 or 0.4.0 (#2496).

Highlights of this release:

• The geopandas.read_file() and GeoDataFrame.to_file() methods to read and write GIS file formats can now optionally use the pyogrio package under the hood through the engine="pyogrio" keyword. The pyogrio package implements vectorized IO for GDAL/OGR vector data sources, and is faster compared to the fiona-based engine (#2225).
• GeoParquet support updated to implement v0.4.0 of the OpenGeospatial/GeoParquet specification (#2441). Backwards compatibility with v0.1.0 of the metadata spec (implemented in the previous releases of GeoPandas) is guaranteed, and reading and writing Parquet and Feather files will no longer produce a UserWarning (#2327).

New features and improvements:

• Improved handling of GeoDataFrame when the active geometry column is lost from the GeoDataFrame. Previously, square bracket indexing gdf[[...]] returned a GeoDataFrame when the active geometry column was retained and a DataFrame was returned otherwise. Other pandas indexing methods (loc, iloc, etc) did not follow the same rules. The new behaviour for all indexing/reshaping operations is now as follows (#2329, #2060):

  • If operations produce a DataFrame containing the active geometry column, a GeoDataFrame is returned
  • If operations produce a DataFrame containing GeometryDtype columns, but not the active geometry column, a GeoDataFrame is returned, where the active geometry column is set to None (set the new geometry column with set_geometry())
  • If operations produce a DataFrame containing no GeometryDtype columns, a DataFrame is returned (this can be upcast again by calling set_geometry() or the GeoDataFrame constructor)
  • If operations produce a Series of GeometryDtype, a GeoSeries is returned, otherwise Series is returned.
  • Error messages for having an invalid geometry column have been improved, indicating the name of the last valid active geometry column set and whether other geometry columns can be promoted to the active geometry column (#2329).

• Datetime fields are now read and written correctly for GIS formats which support them (e.g. GPKG, GeoJSON) with fiona 1.8.14 or higher. Previously, datetimes were read as strings (#2202).

• folium.Map keyword arguments can now be specified as the map_kwds argument to GeoDataFrame.explore() method (#2315).

• Add a new parameter style_function to GeoDataFrame.explore() to enable plot styling based on GeoJSON properties (#2377).

• It is now possible to write an empty GeoDataFrame to a file for supported formats (#2240). Attempting to do so will now emit a UserWarning instead of a ValueError.

• Fast rectangle clipping has been exposed as GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame.clip_by_rect() (#1928).

• The mask parameter of GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame.clip() now accepts a rectangular mask as a list-like to perform fast rectangle clipping using the new GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame.clip_by_rect() (#2414).

• Bundled demo dataset naturalearth_lowres has been updated to version 5.0.1 of the source, with field ISO_A3 manually corrected for some cases (#2418).

Deprecations and compatibility notes:

• The active development branch of geopandas on GitHub has been renamed from master to main (#2277).
• Deprecated methods GeometryArray.equals_exact() and GeometryArray.almost_equals() have been removed. They should be replaced with GeometryArray.geom_equals_exact() and GeometryArray.geom_almost_equals() respectively (#2267).
• Deprecated CRS functions explicit_crs_from_epsg(), epsg_from_crs() and get_epsg_file_contents() were removed (#2340).
• Warning about the behaviour change to GeoSeries.isna() with empty geometries present has been removed (#2349).
• Specifying a CRS in the GeoDataFrame/GeoSeries constructor which contradicted the underlying GeometryArray now raises a ValueError (#2100).
• Specifying a CRS in the GeoDataFrame constructor when no geometry column is provided and calling GeoDataFrame. set_crs on a GeoDataFrame without an active geometry column now raise a ValueError (#2100)
• Passing non-geometry data to theGeoSeries constructor is now fully deprecated and will raise a TypeError (#2314). Previously, a pandas.Series was returned for non-geometry data.
• Deprecated GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame set operations __xor__(), __or__(), __and__() and __sub__(), geopandas.io.file.read_file/to_file and geopandas.io.sql.read_postgis now emit FutureWarning instead of DeprecationWarning and will be completely removed in a future release.
• Accessing the crs of a GeoDataFrame without active geometry column is deprecated and will be removed in GeoPandas 0.12 (#2373).

Bug fixes:

• GeoSeries.to_frame now creates a GeoDataFrame with the geometry column name set correctly (#2296)
• Fix pickle files created with pygeos installed can not being readable when pygeos is not installed (#2237).
• Fixed UnboundLocalError in GeoDataFrame.plot() using legend=True and missing_kwds (#2281).
• Fix explode() incorrectly relating index to columns, including where the input index is not unique (#2292)
• Fix GeoSeries.[xyz] raising an IndexError when the underlying GeoSeries contains empty points (#2335). Rows corresponding to empty points now contain np.nan.
• Fix GeoDataFrame.iloc raising a TypeError when indexing a GeoDataFrame with only a single column of GeometryDtype (#1970).
• Fix GeoDataFrame.iterfeatures() not returning features with the same field order as GeoDataFrame.columns (#2396).
• Fix GeoDataFrame.from_features() to support reading GeoJSON with null properties (#2243).
• Fix GeoDataFrame.to_parquet() not intercepting engine keyword argument, breaking consistency with pandas (#2227)
• Fix GeoDataFrame.explore() producing an error when column is of boolean dtype (#2403).
• Fix an issue where GeoDataFrame.to_postgis() output the wrong SRID for ESRI authority CRS (#2414).
• Fix GeoDataFrame.from_dict/from_features classmethods using GeoDataFrame rather than cls as the constructor.
• Fix GeoDataFrame.plot() producing incorrect colors with mixed geometry types when colors keyword is provided. (#2420)

Notes on (optional) dependencies:

• GeoPandas 0.11 drops support for Python 3.7 and pandas 0.25 (the minimum supported pandas version is now 1.0.5). Further, the minimum required versions for the listed dependencies have now changed to shapely 1.7, fiona 1.8.13.post1, pyproj 2.6.1.post1, matplotlib 3.2, mapclassify 2.4.0 (#2358, #2391)

Small bug-fix release:

• Fix regression in overlay() in case no geometries are intersecting (but have overlapping total bounds) (#2172).
• Fix regression in overlay() with keep_geom_type=True in case the overlay of two geometries in a GeometryCollection with other geometry types (#2177).
• Fix overlay() to honor the keep_geom_type keyword for the op="difference" case (#2164).
• Fix regression in plot() with a mapclassify scheme in case the formatted legend labels have duplicates (#2166).
• Fix a bug in the explore() method ignoring the vmin and vmax keywords in case they are set to 0 (#2175).
• Fix unary_union to correctly handle a GeoSeries with missing values (#2181).
• Avoid internal deprecation warning in clip() (#2179).

Small bug-fix release:

• Fix regression in overlay() with non-overlapping geometries and a non-default how (i.e. not "intersection") (#2157).

Highlights of this release:

• A new sjoin_nearest() method to join based on proximity, with the ability to set a maximum search radius (#1865). In addition, the sindex attribute gained a new method for a "nearest" spatial index query (#1865, #2053).
• A new explore() method on GeoDataFrame and GeoSeries with native support for interactive visualization based on folium / leaflet.js (#1953)
• The geopandas.sjoin()/overlay()/clip() functions are now also available as methods on the GeoDataFrame (#2141, #1984, #2150).

New features and improvements:

• Add support for pandas' value_counts() method for geometry dtype (#2047).
• The explode() method has a new ignore_index keyword (consistent with pandas' explode method) to reset the index in the result, and a new index_parts keywords to control whether a cumulative count indexing the parts of the exploded multi-geometries should be added (#1871).
• points_from_xy() is now available as a GeoSeries method from_xy (#1936).
• The to_file() method will now attempt to detect the driver (if not specified) based on the extension of the provided filename, instead of defaulting to ESRI Shapefile (#1609).
• Support for the storage_options keyword in read_parquet() for specifying filesystem-specific options (e.g. for S3) based on fsspec (#2107).
• The read/write functions now support ~ (user home directory) expansion (#1876).
• Support the convert_dtypes() method from pandas to preserve the GeoDataFrame class (#2115).
• Support WKB values in the hex format in GeoSeries.from_wkb() (#2106).
• Update the estimate_utm_crs() method to handle crossing the antimeridian with pyproj 3.1+ (#2049).
• Improved heuristic to decide how many decimals to show in the repr based on whether the CRS is projected or geographic (#1895).
• Switched the default for geocode() from GeoCode.Farm to the Photon geocoding API (https://photon.komoot.io) (#2007).

Deprecations and compatibility notes:

• The op= keyword of sjoin() to indicate which spatial predicate to use for joining is being deprecated and renamed in favor of a new predicate= keyword (#1626).
• The cascaded_union attribute is deprecated, use unary_union instead (#2074).
• Constructing a GeoDataFrame with a duplicated "geometry" column is now disallowed. This can also raise an error in the pd.concat(.., axis=1) function if this results in duplicated active geometry columns (#2046).
• The explode() method currently returns a GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame with a MultiIndex, with an additional level with indices of the parts of the exploded multi-geometries. For consistency with pandas, this will change in the future and the new index_parts keyword is added to control this.

Bug fixes:

• Fix in the clip() function to correctly clip MultiPoints instead of leaving them intact when partly outside of the clip bounds (#2148).
• Fix GeoSeries.isna() to correctly return a boolean Series in case of an empty GeoSeries (#2073).
• Fix the GeoDataFrame constructor to preserve the geometry name when the argument is already a GeoDataFrame object (i.e. GeoDataFrame(gdf)) (#2138).
• Fix loss of the values' CRS when setting those values as a column (GeoDataFrame.__setitem__) (#1963)
• Fix in GeoDataFrame.apply() to preserve the active geometry column name (#1955).
• Fix in sjoin() to not ignore the suffixes in case of a right-join (how="right) (#2065).
• Fix GeoDataFrame.explode() with a MultiIndex (#1945).
• Fix the handling of missing values in to/from_wkb and to_from_wkt (#1891).
• Fix to_file() and to_json() when DataFrame has duplicate columns to raise an error (#1900).
• Fix bug in the colors shown with user-defined classification scheme (#2019).
• Fix handling of the path_effects keyword in plot() (#2127).
• Fix GeoDataFrame.explode() to preserve attrs (#1935)

Notes on (optional) dependencies:

• GeoPandas 0.10.0 dropped support for Python 3.6 and pandas 0.24. Further, the minimum required versions are numpy 1.18, shapely 1.6, fiona 1.8, matplotlib 3.1 and pyproj 2.2.
• Plotting with a classification schema now requires mapclassify version >= 2.4 (#1737).
• Compatibility fixes for the latest numpy in combination with Shapely 1.7 (#2072)
• Compatibility fixes for the upcoming Shapely 1.8 (#2087).
• Compatibility fixes for the latest PyGEOS (#1872, #2014) and matplotlib (colorbar issue, #2066).

Many documentation improvements and a restyled and restructured website with a new logo (#1564, #1579, #1617, #1668, #1731, #1750, #1757, #1759).

New features and improvements:

• The geopandas.read_file function now accepts more general file-like objects (e.g. fsspec open file objects). It will now also automatically recognize zipped files (#1535).
• The GeoDataFrame.plot() method now provides access to the pandas plotting functionality for the non-geometry columns, either using the kind keyword or the accessor method (e.g. gdf.plot(kind="bar") or gdf.plot.bar()) (#1465).
• New from_wkt(), from_wkb(), to_wkt(), to_wkb() methods for GeoSeries to construct a GeoSeries from geometries in WKT or WKB representation, or to convert a GeoSeries to a pandas Seriew with WKT or WKB values (#1710).
• New GeoSeries.z attribute to access the z-coordinates of Point geometries (similar to the existing .x and .y attributes) (#1773).
• The to_crs() method now handles missing values (#1618).
• Support for pandas' new .attrs functionality (#1658).
• The dissolve() method now allows dissolving by no column (by=None) to create a union of all geometries (single-row GeoDataFrame) (#1568).
• New estimate_utm_crs() method on GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame to determine the UTM CRS based on the bounds (#1646).
• GeoDataFrame.from_dict() now accepts geometry and crs keywords (#1619).
• GeoDataFrame.to_postgis() and geopandas.read_postgis() now supports both sqlalchemy engine and connection objects (#1638).
• The GeoDataFrame.explode() method now allows exploding based on a non-geometry column, using the pandas implementation (#1720).
• Performance improvement in GeoDataFrame/GeoSeries.explode() when using the PyGEOS backend (#1693).
• The binary operation and predicate methods (eg intersection(), intersects()) have a new align keyword which allows optionally not aligning on the index before performing the operation with align=False (#1668).
• The GeoDataFrame.dissolve() method now supports all relevant keywords of groupby(), i.e. the level, sort, observed and dropna keywords (#1845).
• The geopandas.overlay() function now accepts make_valid=False to skip the step to ensure the input geometries are valid using buffer(0) (#1802).
• The GeoDataFrame.to_json() method gained a drop_id keyword to optionally not write the GeoDataFrame's index as the "id" field in the resulting JSON (#1637).
• A new aspect keyword in the plotting methods to optionally allow retaining the original aspect (#1512)
• A new interval keyword in the legend_kwds group of the plot() method to control the appearance of the legend labels when using a classification scheme (#1605).
• The spatial index of a GeoSeries (accessed with the sindex attribute) is now stored on the underlying array. This ensures that the spatial index is preserved in more operations where possible, and that multiple geometry columns of a GeoDataFrame can each have a spatial index (#1444).
• Addition of a has_sindex attribute on the GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame to check if a spatial index has already been initialized (#1627).
• The geopandas.testing.assert_geoseries_equal() and assert_geodataframe_equal() testing utilities now have a normalize keyword (False by default) to normalize geometries before comparing for equality (#1826). Those functions now also give a more informative error message when failing (#1808).

Deprecations and compatibility notes:

• The is_ring attribute currently returns True for Polygons. In the future, this will be False (#1631). In addition, start to check it for LineStrings and LinearRings (instead of always returning False).
• The deprecated objects keyword in the intersection() method of the GeoDataFrame/GeoSeries.sindex spatial index object has been removed (#1444).

Bug fixes:

• Fix regression in the plot() method raising an error with empty geometries (#1702, #1828).
• Fix geopandas.overlay() to preserve geometries of the correct type which are nested within a GeometryCollection as a result of the overlay operation (#1582). In addition, a warning will now be raised if geometries of different type are dropped from the result (#1554).
• Fix the repr of an empty GeoSeries to not show spurious warnings (#1673).
• Fix the .crs for empty GeoDataFrames (#1560).
• Fix geopandas.clip to preserve the correct geometry column name (#1566).
• Fix bug in plot() method when using legend_kwds with multiple subplots (#1583)
• Fix spurious warning with missing_kwds keyword of the plot() method when there are no areas with missing data (#1600).
• Fix the plot() method to correctly align values passed to the column keyword as a pandas Series (#1670).
• Fix bug in plotting MultiPoints when passing values to determine the color (#1694)
• The rename_geometry() method now raises a more informative error message when a duplicate column name is used (#1602).
• Fix explode() method to preserve the CRS (#1655)
• Fix the GeoSeries.apply() method to again accept the convert_dtype keyword to be consistent with pandas (#1636).
• Fix GeoDataFrame.apply() to preserve the CRS when possible (#1848).
• Fix bug in containment test as geom in geoseries (#1753).
• The shift() method of a GeoSeries/GeoDataFrame now preserves the CRS (#1744).
• The PostGIS IO functionality now quotes table names to ensure it works with case-sensitive names (#1825).
• Fix the GeoSeries constructor without passing data but only an index (#1798).

Notes on (optional) dependencies:

• GeoPandas 0.9.0 dropped support for Python 3.5. Further, the minimum required versions are pandas 0.24, numpy 1.15 and shapely 1.6 and fiona 1.8.
• The descartes package is no longer required for plotting polygons. This functionality is now included by default in GeoPandas itself, when matplotlib is available (#1677).
• Fiona is now only imported when used in read_file/to_file. This means you can now force geopandas to install without fiona installed (although it is still a default requirement) (#1775).
• Compatibility with the upcoming Shapely 1.8 (#1659, #1662, #1819).

Small bug-fix release for compatibility with PyGEOS 0.9.

Small bug-fix release:

• Fix a regression in the plot() method when visualizing with a JenksCaspallSampled or FisherJenksSampled scheme (#1486).
• Fix spurious warning in GeoDataFrame.to_postgis (#1497).
• Fix the un-pickling with pd.read_pickle of files written with older GeoPandas versions (#1511).

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.

Support for Python 2.7 has been dropped. GeoPandas now works with Python >= 3.5.

The important API change of this release is that GeoPandas now requires PROJ > 6 and pyproj > 2.2, and that the .crs attribute of a GeoSeries and GeoDataFrame no longer stores the CRS information as a proj4 string or dict, but as a pyproj.CRS object (#1101).

This gives a better user interface and integrates improvements from pyproj and PROJ 6, but might also require some changes in your code. Check the migration guide in the documentation.

Other API changes;

• The GeoDataFrame.to_file method will now also write the GeoDataFrame index to the file, if the index is named and/or non-integer. You can use the index=True/False keyword to overwrite this default inference (#1059).

New features and improvements:

• A new geopandas.clip function to clip a GeoDataFrame to the spatial extent of another shape (#1128).
• The geopandas.overlay function now works for all geometry types, including points and linestrings in addition to polygons (#1110).
• The plot() method gained support for missing values (in the column that determines the colors). By default it doesn't plot the corresponding geometries, but using the new missing_kwds argument you can specify how to style those geometries (#1156).
• The plot() method now also supports plotting GeometryCollection and LinearRing objects (#1225).
• Added support for filtering with a geometry or reading a subset of the rows in geopandas.read_file (#1160).
• Added support for the new nullable integer data type of pandas in GeoDataFrame.to_file (#1220).

Bug fixes:

• GeoSeries.reset_index() now correctly results in a GeoDataFrame instead of DataFrame (#1252).
• Fixed the geopandas.sjoin function to handle MultiIndex correctly (#1159).
• Fixed the geopandas.sjoin function to preserve the index name of the left GeoDataFrame (#1150).

Small bug-fix release:

• Compatibility with Shapely 1.7 and pandas 1.0 (#1244).
• Fix GeoDataFrame.fillna to accept non-geometry values again when there are no missing values in the geometry column. This should make it easier to fill the numerical columns of the GeoDataFrame (#1279).

Small bug-fix release fixing a few regressions:

• Fix a regression in passing an array of RRB(A) tuples to the .plot() method (#1178, #1211).
• Fix the bounds and total_bounds attributes for empty GeoSeries, which also fixes the repr of an empty or all-NA GeoSeries (#1184, #1195).
• Fix filtering of a GeoDataFrame to preserve the index type when ending up with an empty result (#1190).

Small bug-fix release fixing a few regressions:

• Fix astype when converting to string with Multi geometries (#1145) or when converting a dataframe without geometries (#1144).
• Fix GeoSeries.fillna to accept np.nan again (#1149).

Important note! This will be the last release to support Python 2.7 (#1031)

API changes:

• A refactor of the internals based on the pandas ExtensionArray interface (#1000). The main user visible changes are:

  • The .dtype of a GeoSeries is now a 'geometry' dtype (and no longer a numpy object dtype).
  • The .values of a GeoSeries now returns a custom GeometryArray, and no longer a numpy array. To get back a numpy array of Shapely scalars, you can convert explicitly using np.asarray(..).

• The GeoSeries constructor now raises a warning when passed non-geometry data. Currently the constructor falls back to return a pandas Series, but in the future this will raise an error (#1085).

• The missing value handling has been changed to now separate the concepts of missing geometries and empty geometries (#601, 1062). In practice this means that (see the docs for more details):

  • GeoSeries.isna now considers only missing values, and if you want to check for empty geometries, you can use GeoSeries.is_empty (GeoDataFrame.isna already only looked at missing values).
  • GeoSeries.dropna now actually drops missing values (before it didn't drop either missing or empty geometries)
  • GeoSeries.fillna only fills missing values (behaviour unchanged).
  • GeoSeries.align uses missing values instead of empty geometries by default to fill non-matching index entries.

New features and improvements:

• Addition of a GeoSeries.affine_transform method, equivalent of Shapely's function (#1008).
• Addition of a GeoDataFrame.rename_geometry method to easily rename the active geometry column (#1053).
• Addition of geopandas.show_versions() function, which can be used to give an overview of the installed libraries in bug reports (#899).
• The legend_kwds keyword of the plot() method can now also be used to specify keywords for the color bar (#1102).
• Performance improvement in the sjoin() operation by reusing existing spatial index of the input dataframes, if available (#789).
• Updated documentation to work with latest version of geoplot and contextily (#1044, #1088).
• A new geopandas.options configuration, with currently a single option to control the display precision of the coordinates (options.display_precision). The default is now to show less coordinates (3 for projected and 5 for geographic coordinates), but the default can be overridden with the option.

Bug fixes:

• Also try to use pysal instead of mapclassify if available (#1082).
• The GeoDataFrame.astype() method now correctly returns a GeoDataFrame if the geometry column is preserved (#1009).
• The to_crs method now uses always_xy=True to ensure correct lon/lat order handling for pyproj>=2.2.0 (#1122).
• Fixed passing list-like colors in the plot() method in case of "multi" geometries (#1119).
• Fixed the coloring of shapes and colorbar when passing a custom norm in the plot() method (#1091, #1089).
• Fixed GeoDataFrame.to_file to preserve VFS file paths (e.g. when a "s3://" path is specified) (#1124).
• Fixed failing case in geopandas.sjoin with empty geometries (#1138).

In addition, the minimum required versions of some dependencies have been increased: GeoPandas now requires pandas >=0.23.4 and matplotlib >=2.0.1 (#1002).

• Compatibility with latest mapclassify version 2.1.0 (#1025).

Improvements:

• Significant performance improvement (around 10x) for GeoDataFrame.iterfeatures, which also improves GeoDataFrame.to_file (#864).

• File IO enhancements based on Fiona 1.8:

  • Support for writing bool dtype (#855) and datetime dtype, if the file format supports it (#728).
  • Support for writing dataframes with multiple geometry types, if the file format allows it (e.g. GeoJSON for all types, or ESRI Shapefile for Polygon+MultiPolygon) (#827, #867, #870).

• Compatibility with pyproj >= 2 (#962).

• A new geopandas.points_from_xy() helper function to convert x and y coordinates to Point objects (#896).

• The buffer and interpolate methods now accept an array-like to specify a variable distance for each geometry (#781).

• Addition of a relate method, corresponding to the shapely method that returns the DE-9IM matrix (#853).

• Plotting improvements:

  • Performance improvement in plotting by only flattening the geometries if there are actually 'Multi' geometries (#785).
  • Choropleths: access to all mapclassify classification schemes and addition of the classification_kwds keyword in the plot method to specify options for the scheme (#876).
  • Ability to specify a matplotlib axes object on which to plot the color bar with the cax keyword, in order to have more control over the color bar placement (#894).

• Changed the default provider in geopandas.tools.geocode from Google (now requires an API key) to Geocode.Farm (#907, #975).

Bug fixes:

• Remove the edge in the legend marker (#807).
• Fix the align method to preserve the CRS (#829).
• Fix geopandas.testing.assert_geodataframe_equal to correctly compare left and right dataframes (#810).
• Fix in choropleth mapping when the values contain missing values (#877).
• Better error message in sjoin if the input is not a GeoDataFrame (#842).
• Fix in read_postgis to handle nullable (missing) geometries (#856).
• Correctly passing through the parse_dates keyword in read_postgis to the underlying pandas method (#860).
• Fixed the shape of Antarctica in the included demo dataset 'naturalearth_lowres' (by updating to the latest version) (#804).

Small bug-fix release for compatibility with the latest Fiona and PySAL releases:

• Compatibility with Fiona 1.8: fix deprecation warning (#854).
• Compatibility with PySAL 2.0: switched to mapclassify instead of PySAL as dependency for choropleth mapping with the scheme keyword (#872).
• Fix for new overlay implementation in case the intersection is empty (#800).

Improvements:

• Improved overlay function (better performance, several incorrect behaviours fixed) (#429)
• Pass keywords to control legend behavior (legend_kwds) to plot (#434)
• Add basic support for reading remote datasets in read_file (#531)
• Pass kwargs for buffer operation on GeoSeries (#535)
• Expose all geopy services as options in geocoding (#550)
• Faster write speeds to GeoPackage (#605)
• Permit read_file filtering with a bounding box from a GeoDataFrame (#613)
• Set CRS on GeoDataFrame returned by read_postgis (#627)
• Permit setting markersize for Point GeoSeries plots with column values (#633)
• Started an example gallery (#463, #690, #717)
• Support for plotting MultiPoints (#683)
• Testing functionality (e.g. assert_geodataframe_equal) is now publicly exposed (#707)
• Add explode method to GeoDataFrame (similar to the GeoSeries method) (#671)
• Set equal aspect on active axis on multi-axis figures (#718)
• Pass array of values to column argument in plot (#770)

Bug fixes:

• Ensure that colorbars are plotted on the correct axis (#523)
• Handle plotting empty GeoDataFrame (#571)
• Save z-dimension when writing files (#652)
• Handle reading empty shapefiles (#653)
• Correct dtype for empty result of spatial operations (#685)
• Fix empty sjoin handling for pandas>=0.23 (#762)

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)

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.cx 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).