Book Image

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python

By : Joel Lawhead
Book Image

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python

By: Joel Lawhead

Overview of this book

Geospatial Analysis is used in almost every field you can think of from medicine, to defense, to farming. This book will guide you gently into this exciting and complex field. It walks you through the building blocks of geospatial analysis and how to apply them to influence decision making using the latest Python software. Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python, 2nd Edition uses the expressive and powerful Python 3 programming language to guide you through geographic information systems, remote sensing, topography, and more, while providing a framework for you to approach geospatial analysis effectively, but on your own terms. We start by giving you a little background on the field, and a survey of the techniques and technology used. We then split the field into its component specialty areas: GIS, remote sensing, elevation data, advanced modeling, and real-time data. This book will teach you everything you need to know about, Geospatial Analysis from using a particular software package or API to using generic algorithms that can be applied. This book focuses on pure Python whenever possible to minimize compiling platform-dependent binaries, so that you don’t become bogged down in just getting ready to do analysis. This book will round out your technical library through handy recipes that will give you a good understanding of a field that supplements many a modern day human endeavors.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 5. Python and Geographic Information Systems

This chapter will focus on applying Python to functions typically performed by a geographic information system (GIS) such as QGIS or ArcGIS. We will continue to use as few external dependencies as possible outside Python itself, so you have tools which are as reusable as possible in different environments. In this book, we separate GIS analysis and remote sensing from programming perspective, which means that in this chapter, we'll focus on mostly vector data.

As with other chapters in this book, the items presented here are core functions that serve as building blocks which can be recombined to solve challenges you will encounter beyond this book. This chapter includes the following topics:

  • Measuring distance

  • Converting coordinates

  • Reprojecting vector data

  • Editing shapefiles

  • Selecting data from within larger datasets

  • Creating thematic maps

  • Conversion of non-GIS data types

  • Geocoding

This chapter contains many code samples. In addition to the text...