Book Image

Mastering Geospatial Analysis with Python

By : Silas Toms, Paul Crickard, Eric van Rees
Book Image

Mastering Geospatial Analysis with Python

By: Silas Toms, Paul Crickard, Eric van Rees

Overview of this book

Python comes with a host of open source libraries and tools that help you work on professional geoprocessing tasks without investing in expensive tools. This book will introduce Python developers, both new and experienced, to a variety of new code libraries that have been developed to perform geospatial analysis, statistical analysis, and data management. This book will use examples and code snippets that will help explain how Python 3 differs from Python 2, and how these new code libraries can be used to solve age-old problems in geospatial analysis. You will begin by understanding what geoprocessing is and explore the tools and libraries that Python 3 offers. You will then learn to use Python code libraries to read and write geospatial data. You will then learn to perform geospatial queries within databases and learn PyQGIS to automate analysis within the QGIS mapping suite. Moving forward, you will explore the newly released ArcGIS API for Python and ArcGIS Online to perform geospatial analysis and create ArcGIS Online web maps. Further, you will deep dive into Python Geospatial web frameworks and learn to create a geospatial REST API.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
7
Geoprocessing with Geodatabases
Index

Raster operations using GDAL


The GDAL library allows you to read and write both vector and raster data. To install GDAL on Windows, you will need the appropriate binaries:

Note

You can download OSGeo4W, which contains the binaries, at: https://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/

When you have the binaries, you can install gdal using conda, as follows:

conda install -c conda-forge gdal

In the following sections, you will learn how to load and work with a .tif file.

Using the GDAL library to load and query rasters

Now that you have gdal installed, import it using:

from osgeo import gdal

GDAL 2 is the most recent version. If you have an older version of gdal installed, you may need to import it using the following code:

import gdal

If this is the case, you may want to look into upgrading your version of gdal. Once you have gdal imported, you can open a raster image. First, let's get an image from the web. The Earth Data Analysis Center at the University of New Mexico maintains the Resource Geographic Information...