Geographic Data#

import hvplot.pandas  # noqa
import hvplot.xarray  # noqa
import xarray as xr

from bokeh.sampledata.airport_routes import airports

Introduction#

hvPlot can display geographic data and can be used to add contextualisation layers:

Overlay the data over a tiled web map
Overlay the data over geographic/administrative features
Plot the data in a specific projection

Many, but not all, of these features require GeoViews to be installed, which is the geographic extension of HoloViews built on Cartopy and pyproj. You can install GeoViews with pip install geoviews or conda install geoviews.

Before plotting geographical data, you should know in which coordinate system the data is represented. This is important for a few reasons:

The data may have to be projected to another coordinate system, and to do so you may have to provide the original coordinate system.
Projecting data can be a computationally expensive operation and you should be aware of when this operation happens, to perhaps optimize it.

Here are two common coordinate systems you will encounter when dealing with geographic data and using hvPlot:

Data represented by latitude/longitude (lat/lon) coordinates are often tied to the WGS84 geographic coordinate system (EPSG:4326), that’s how GPS data are located on the Earth. For example, the coordinates of Paris in this system are (lat=48.856697, lon=2.351462).
Tiled web maps are displayed in the Web Mercator projection (also known as Pseudo-Mercator or Google Mercator, EPSG:3857). Unlike WGS84 which expresses coordinates in lat/long decimal degrees, Web Mercator expresses them in easting (X) /northing (Y) metric units. For example, the coordinates of Paris in this system are (easting=261763.552, northing=6250580.761).

Supported plot types#

Only certain hvPlot types support geographic coordinates, currently including: points, polygons, paths, image, quadmesh, contour, and contourf.

Tiled web map#

A tiled web map, or tile map, is an interactive map displayed on a web browser that is divided into small, pre-rendered image tiles, allowing for efficient loading and seamless navigation across various zoom levels and geographic areas. hvPlot allows us to add a tile map as a basemap to a plot with the tiles parameter. Importantly, tiles is a parameter that can be used without installing GeoViews.

We’ll display this dataframe of all US airports (including military bases overseas), the points are expressed in latitude/longitude coordinates:

airports.head(3)

	AirportID	Name	City	Country	IATA	ICAO	Latitude	Longitude	Altitude	Timezone	DST	TZ	Type	source
0	3411	Barter Island LRRS Airport	Barter Island	United States	BTI	PABA	70.134003	-143.582001	2	-9	A	America/Anchorage	airport	OurAirports
1	3413	Cape Lisburne LRRS Airport	Cape Lisburne	United States	LUR	PALU	68.875099	-166.110001	16	-9	A	America/Anchorage	airport	OurAirports
2	3414	Point Lay LRRS Airport	Point Lay	United States	PIZ	PPIZ	69.732903	-163.005005	22	-9	A	America/Anchorage	airport	OurAirports

We’ll first start by displaying the airports without GeoViews with tiles by setting tiles=True.

Under the hood, hvPlot projects lat/lon to easting/northing (EPSG:4326 to EPSG:3857) coordinates without additional package dependencies if it detects that the values falls within expected lat/lon ranges, unless the data is lazily loaded (dask / ibis), or the data is a spatialpandas object.

Note, this feature is only available after hvplot>=0.11.0; older versions, hvplot<0.11.0, require manual projection (see below).

airports.hvplot.points('Longitude', 'Latitude', tiles=True, color='red', alpha=0.2)

If you do not want it to be auto-projected under the hood for any reason, set projection=False, but note it will not be properly placed on the tiles without manual intervention. In doing so, the data will be plotted around the null island location, roughly 600km off the coast of West Africa. padding was added to demonstrate this.

airports.hvplot.points('Longitude', 'Latitude', tiles=True, projection=False, color='red', alpha=0.2, padding=10000)

To manually project use the lon_lat_to_easting_northing function provided by HoloViews, that doesn’t require installing any of the usual geo dependencies like pyproj or cartopy.

from holoviews.util.transform import lon_lat_to_easting_northing

airports['x'], airports['y'] = lon_lat_to_easting_northing(airports.Longitude, airports.Latitude)
airports[['Latitude', 'Longitude', 'x', 'y']].head(3)
airports.hvplot.points('x', 'y', tiles=True, color='red', alpha=0.2)

When GeoViews is installed, you can set geo=True to let hvPlot know that it can leverage it to display the data. You can directly plot the airports without having to project the data yourself, GeoViews will take care of projecting it to Web Mercator automatically.

airports.hvplot.points(
    'Longitude', 'Latitude', geo=True, tiles=True, color='red', alpha=0.2
)

The easiest ways to set tiles include:

to True to get the default layer which currently is from OpenStreetMap (prefer one of the explicit approaches below if you care about reproducibility)
with an xyzservices.TileProvider instance that can be created from the optional dependency xyzservices which gives you access to hundreds of tiled web maps
with the name of one the layers shipped by HoloViews and GeoViews (when it’s installed), like 'EsriTerrain'.

The tile map can be additionally configured by setting tiles_opts with a dictionary of options that will be applied to the basemap layer.

import xyzservices.providers as xyz

airports.hvplot.points(
    'x', 'y', tiles=xyz.Esri.WorldPhysical, tiles_opts={'alpha': 0.5}, color='red', alpha=0.2
)

Data and plot projections#

import cartopy.crs as ccrs 

As we have seen in the previous section, you can set geo=True to let hvPlot know that your data is geographic. GeoViews must be installed when setting geo=True, or when any of the other geographic options is set, except tiles. In this mode hvPlot:

Assumes the data is expressed in lat/lon coordinates. Internally, hvPlot assumes a Plate Carrée projection, also known as the equirectangular projection.
Displays the data in the projection Plate Carrée assumed in step (1), or, if tiles=True, projects and displays the data in the Web Mercator projection.

The input data projection assumed in step (1), and the output plot projection used in step (2) can both be overridden with the crs (for Coordinate Reference System) and projection parameters, respectively. Both parameters accept cartopy CRS objects (see the full list of values they accept in their definition). You can now see that that setting geo=True, tiles=True is strictly equivalent to setting crs=ccrs.PlateCarree(), projection=ccrs.GOOGLE_MERCATOR! Coordinate reference systems are described in more details in the GeoViews documentation and the full list of available CRSs is in the cartopy documentation.

For example, we can set projection to display the airports on an Orthographic projection centered over North America.

airports.hvplot.points(
    'Longitude', 'Latitude', color='red', alpha=0.2,
    coastline=True, projection=ccrs.Orthographic(-90, 30)
)

Geopandas usage#

Since a GeoPandas DataFrame is just a Pandas DataFrames with additional geographic information, it inherits the .hvplot method. We can thus easily load geographic files (GeoJSON, Shapefiles, etc) and plot them on a map:

import geopandas as gpd
import geodatasets

path = geodatasets.get_path("geoda.nyc_neighborhoods")
path

'/home/runner/.cache/geodatasets/nycnhood_acs.zip'

nyc = gpd.read_file(path)
nyc.head(3)

	UEMPRATE	cartodb_id	borocode	withssi	withsocial	withpubass	struggling	profession	popunemplo	poptot	...	boroname	popdty	ntacode	medianinco	medianagem	medianagef	medianage	HHsize	gini	geometry
0	0.095785	1	3	652	5067	277	6421	889	2225	48351	...	Brooklyn	497498.701	BK45	1520979	663.3	777.1	722.6	2.96421052631579	0.386315789473684	POLYGON ((-73.91716 40.63173, -73.91722 40.631...
1	0.090011	2	3	2089	7132	1016	10981	1075	2652	61584	...	Brooklyn	589296.926	BK17	1054259	791.4	868.5	827.6	2.46578947368421	0.448089473684211	POLYGON ((-73.91809 40.58657, -73.91813 40.586...
2	0.130393	3	3	3231	8847	2891	21235	712	6483	100130	...	Brooklyn	1506628.84	BK61	980637	863.1	983.9	923.8	2.42925925925926	0.473666666666667	POLYGON ((-73.92165 40.67887, -73.92171 40.678...

3 rows × 99 columns

nyc.hvplot(geo=True, tiles=True, c="poptot", alpha=0.8, tiles_opts={'alpha': 0.5})

The GeoPandas support allows plotting GeoDataFrames containing 'Point', 'Polygon', 'LineString' and 'LineRing' geometries, but not ones containing a mixture of different geometry types. Calling .hvplot will automatically figure out the geometry type to plot, but it also possible to call .hvplot.points, .hvplot.polygons, and .hvplot.paths explicitly.

Spatialpandas usage#

Spatialpandas is another powerful library for working with geometries and is optimized for rendering with datashader, making it possible to plot millions of individual geometries very quickly:

import spatialpandas as spd

spd_nyc = spd.GeoDataFrame(nyc)

spd_nyc.hvplot(
    datashade=True, project=True, aggregator='count_cat',
    c='boroname', color_key='Category10'
)

As you can see, hvPlot makes it simple to work with geographic data visually. For more complex plot types and additional details, see the GeoViews documentation.

Options#

The API provides various geo-specific options:

coastline (default=False): Whether to display a coastline on top of the plot, setting coastline='10m'/'50m'/'110m' specifies a specific scale
crs (default=None): Coordinate reference system of the data (input projection) specified as a string or integer EPSG code, a CRS or Proj pyproj object, a Cartopy CRS object or class name, a WKT string, or a proj.4 string. Defaults to PlateCarree.
features features (default=None): A list of features or a dictionary of features and the scale at which to render it. Available features include ‘borders’, ‘coastline’, ‘lakes’, ‘land’, ‘ocean’, ‘rivers’ and ‘states’. Available scales include ‘10m’/’50m’/’110m’.
geo (default=False): Whether the plot should be treated as geographic (and assume PlateCarree, i.e. lat/lon coordinates)
global_extent (default=False): Whether to expand the plot extent to span the whole globe
project (default=False): Whether to project the data before plotting (adds initial overhead but avoids projecting data when plot is dynamically updated)
projection (default=None): Coordinate reference system of the plot (output projection) specified as a string or integer EPSG code, a CRS or Proj pyproj object, a Cartopy CRS object or class name, a WKT string, or a proj.4 string. Defaults to PlateCarree.
tiles (default=False): Whether to overlay the plot on a tile source. If coordinate values fall within lat/lon bounds, auto-projects to EPSG:3857 unless projection=False or if the data is lazily loaded (dask / ibis). Accepts the following values:
- True: OpenStreetMap layer
- xyzservices.TileProvider instance (requires xyzservices to be installed)
- a map string name based on one of the default layers made available by HoloViews (‘CartoDark’, ‘CartoLight’, ‘EsriImagery’, ‘EsriNatGeo’, ‘EsriUSATopo’, ‘EsriTerrain’, ‘EsriStreet’, ‘EsriReference’, ‘OSM’, ‘OpenTopoMap’) or GeoViews (‘CartoDark’, ‘CartoEco’, ‘CartoLight’, ‘CartoMidnight’, ‘EsriImagery’, ‘EsriNatGeo’, ‘EsriUSATopo’, ‘EsriTerrain’, ‘EsriReference’, ‘EsriOceanBase’, ‘EsriOceanReference’, ‘EsriWorldPhysical’, ‘EsriWorldShadedRelief’, ‘EsriWorldTopo’, ‘EsriWorldDarkGrayBase’, ‘EsriWorldDarkGrayReference’, ‘EsriWorldLightGrayBase’, ‘EsriWorldLightGrayReference’, ‘EsriWorldHillshadeDark’, ‘EsriWorldHillshade’, ‘EsriAntarcticImagery’, ‘EsriArcticImagery’, ‘EsriArcticOceanBase’, ‘EsriArcticOceanReference’, ‘EsriWorldBoundariesAndPlaces’, ‘EsriWorldBoundariesAndPlacesAlternate’, ‘EsriWorldTransportation’, ‘EsriDelormeWorldBaseMap’, ‘EsriWorldNavigationCharts’, ‘EsriWorldStreetMap’, ‘OSM’, ‘OpenTopoMap’). Note that Stamen tile sources require a Stadia account when not running locally; see stadiamaps.com.
- a holoviews.Tiles or geoviews.WMTS instance or class
tiles_opts (default=None): Dictionary of plotting options to customize the tiles layer created when tiles is set, e.g. dict(alpha=0.5).

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