The GeoPandas package is an extension of Pandas that works with geographical data, while the Geoplot package is an extension of Matplotlib that's used to plot geographical data. The GeoPandas package comes with a selection of sample datasets that we used in this recipe. naturalearth_lowres contains geometric figures that describe the boundaries of countries in the world. This data is not very high resolution, as signified by its name, which means that some of the finer details of geographical features might not be present on the map. (Some small islands are not shown at all.) naturalearth_cities contains the names and locations of the capital cities of the world. We're using the datasets.get_path routine to retrieve the path for these datasets in the package data directory. The read_file routine imports the data into the Python session.
The Geoplot package provides some additional plotting routines specifically for plotting geographical data....