Lines on Maps in Python
How to draw lines, great circles, and contours on maps in Python.
New to Plotly?
Plotly is a free and open-source graphing library for Python. We recommend you read our Getting Started guide for the latest installation or upgrade instructions, then move on to our Plotly Fundamentals tutorials or dive straight in to some Basic Charts tutorials.
Below we show how to create geographical line plots using either Plotly Express with px.line_geo
function or the lower-level go.Scattergeo
object.
Base Map Configuration¶
Plotly figures made with Plotly Express px.scatter_geo
, px.line_geo
or px.choropleth
functions or containing go.Choropleth
or go.Scattergeo
graph objects have a go.layout.Geo
object which can be used to control the appearance of the base map onto which data is plotted.
Lines on Maps with Plotly Express¶
Plotly Express is the easy-to-use, high-level interface to Plotly, which operates on a variety of types of data and produces easy-to-style figures.
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.gapminder().query("year == 2007")
fig = px.line_geo(df, locations="iso_alpha",
color="continent", # "continent" is one of the columns of gapminder
projection="orthographic")
fig.show()
Lines on Maps from GeoPandas¶
Given a GeoPandas geo-data frame with linestring
or multilinestring
features, one can extra point data and use px.line_geo()
.
import plotly.express as px
import geopandas as gpd
import shapely.geometry
import numpy as np
import wget
# download a zipped shapefile
wget.download("https://plotly.github.io/datasets/ne_50m_rivers_lake_centerlines.zip")
# open a zipped shapefile with the zip:// pseudo-protocol
geo_df = gpd.read_file("zip://ne_50m_rivers_lake_centerlines.zip")
lats = []
lons = []
names = []
for feature, name in zip(geo_df.geometry, geo_df.name):
if isinstance(feature, shapely.geometry.linestring.LineString):
linestrings = [feature]
elif isinstance(feature, shapely.geometry.multilinestring.MultiLineString):
linestrings = feature.geoms
else:
continue
for linestring in linestrings:
x, y = linestring.xy
lats = np.append(lats, y)
lons = np.append(lons, x)
names = np.append(names, [name]*len(y))
lats = np.append(lats, None)
lons = np.append(lons, None)
names = np.append(names, None)
fig = px.line_geo(lat=lats, lon=lons, hover_name=names)
fig.show()