Visualizing maps

To best way to show information that changes from region to region is to create a map that presents the information, while at the same time giving a regional sense of location for the data.

In this recipe, we'll make use of the Fiona module to import GIS information, as well as matplotlib to display the information. We will display a map of Western Europe and display the population of each country with a color grade. The darker the color, the larger the population.

Getting ready

We need to install matplotlib and Fiona in our virtual environment:

$ echo "matplotlib==3.2.1" >> requirements.txt
$ echo "Fiona==1.8.13" >> requirements.txt
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

If you are using macOS, you may get an error like this: RuntimeError: Python is not installed as a framework. See the matplotlib documentation on how to fix it: https://matplotlib.org/faq/osx_framework.html.

The map data needs to be downloaded...