Changes

Version 0.5.0 (April 25, 2019)

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 functionalty (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:

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: