There is a multitude of geospatial libraries for python. In this context, we will focus on a few and especially those that work in google’s colab online python environment.

When it comes to working with statistical maps geoPanads is one of the obvious libraries to start with. GeoPandas is an extension to the general data analytical packages Pandas, but that brings geospatial data into the set of tools to use and especially maps as an output form. When installing geoPandas you also install two important dependencies namely fiona and pyporj. fiona is a library for reading and writing vector geospatial data files, while pyproj is a library for conversion between different coordinate Reference Systems (CRS)

Many of the illustrations on the use of vector data are created using geopandas together with the library shapely for basic creation and manipulation of geospatial data. For background images the library contextily is used.

For more serious mapping you need to look at leafmap or folium Finaly if you want to use Google Earth Engine there is geemap

Accessing geospatial data from Python

One of your first tasks when starting to use Python is to load data into Python This is described in the article “Accessing Geospatial data in Python“

Further reading

• Geographic Data Science with Python
  A rather extensive book covering the basics of geospatial data and python.
• Explore and Visualize Geospatial Data using Leafmap Python Package
  A post from Medium on the use of leafmap to produce interactive maps
• Geographic Data Science with Python
  A rather extensive book covering the basics of geospatial data and python.
• Explore and Visualize Geospatial Data using Leafmap Python Package
  A post from Medium on the use of leafmap to produce interactive maps
• Geo python
  A course that gives the basic concepts of programming (python) and scientific data analysis (developed by the Department of Geosciences and Geography at the University of Helsinki).
• Automating GIS-processes
  An annually updated course in python Geospatial analysis (developed by the Department of Geosciences and Geography at the University of Helsinki).