Python geographical plot with imported data e.g. from the Netherlands

Question

I found this website to get geographical data per country: https://gadm.org/ .

Now I want to import the data from the Netherlands in python and plot my numerical data per province/city in that geographical map.

Someone who has experience with data from this site? Or with other data for geographical plotting in certain countries?

I don't succeed loading this data into Python.

Answer 1

Well I ran into the same issue so here is how I solved a similar problem using matplotlib, pandas and geopandas. Also some inspiration from this article: https://towardsdatascience.com/lets-make-a-map-using-geopandas-pandas-and-matplotlib-to-make-a-chloropleth-map-dddc31c1983d

1. Loading the map

First I downloaded a shapefile of the dutch provinces (if you want other regions, e.g. communes, find a shapefile of those). I used this one: https://maps.princeton.edu/catalog/stanford-st293bj4601, the direct link to the download is: https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:st293bj4601/data.zip

I opened it like this:

import pandas as pd
import geopandas as gpd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

mapdf = gpd.read_file("https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:st293bj4601/data.zip")

This map contains provinces and bodies of water. I only kept the provinces since I dont care about the bodies of water, and I also sorted the data on the province names

mapdf = mapdf[mapdf["TYPE_1"] == "Provincie"]
mapdf.sort_values("NAME_1", inplace=True)
mapdf = mapdf.reset_index(drop=True)

It looks like this:

2. Filling with data

So this is what my data sumdf looks like:

I made sure the provinces are in the same order as in the mapdf

Now that they have the same length and are in the same order I can concatenate. If for some reason you cant easily get your data in the same order, then maybe look on joining it or using some other way to combine them correctly.

I combine them

mapdf = gpd.GeoDataFrame(pd.concat([sumdf, mapdf], axis=1))

and get

You can see the column names, we now have both data in one dataframe.

3. Final Result

Now I can plot my data:

mapdf.plot(column="BUY", figsize=(10,10), legend=True)