Geopandas

-----------------------------

Improvements:

- Improved ``overlay`` function (better performance, several incorrect behaviours fixed) (429)
- Pass keywords to control legend behavior (``legend_kwds``) to ``plot`` (434)
- Add basic support for reading remote datasets in ``read_file`` (531)
- Pass kwargs for ``buffer`` operation on GeoSeries (535)
- Expose all geopy services as options in geocoding (550)
- Faster write speeds to GeoPackage (605)
- Permit ``read_file`` filtering with a bounding box from a GeoDataFrame (613)
- Set CRS on GeoDataFrame returned by ``read_postgis`` (627)
- Permit setting markersize for Point GeoSeries plots with column values (633)
- Started an example gallery (463, 690, 717)
- Support for plotting MultiPoints (683)
- Testing functionality (e.g. ``assert_geodataframe_equal``) is now publicly exposed (707)
- Add ``explode`` method to GeoDataFrame (similar to the GeoSeries method) (671)
- Set equal aspect on active axis on multi-axis figures (718)
- Pass array of values to column argument in ``plot`` (770)

Bug fixes:

- Ensure that colorbars are plotted on the correct axis (523)
- Handle plotting empty GeoDataFrame (571)
- Save z-dimension when writing files (652)
- Handle reading empty shapefiles (653)
- Correct dtype for empty result of spatial operations (685)
- Fix empty ``sjoin`` handling for pandas>=0.23 (762)

-------------------------------

Improvements:

- Improve plotting performance using ``matplotlib.collections`` (267)
- Improve default plotting appearance. The defaults now follow the new matplotlib defaults (318, 502, 510)
- Provide access to x/y coordinates as attributes for Point GeoSeries (383)
- Make the NYBB dataset available through ``geopandas.datasets`` (384)
- Enable ``sjoin`` on non-integer-index GeoDataFrames (422)
- Add ``cx`` indexer to GeoDataFrame (482)
- ``GeoDataFrame.from_features`` now also accepts a Feature Collection (225, 507)
- Use index label instead of integer id in output of ``iterfeatures`` and
``to_json`` (421)
- Return empty data frame rather than raising an error when performing a spatial join with non overlapping geodataframes (335)

Bug fixes:

- Compatibility with shapely 1.6.0 (512)
- Fix ``fiona.filter`` results when bbox is not None (372)
- Fix ``dissolve`` to retain CRS (389)
- Fix ``cx`` behavior when using index of 0 (478)
- Fix display of lower bin in legend label of choropleth plots using a PySAL scheme (450)

-------------

Improvements:

- Complete overhaul of the documentation
- Addition of ``overlay`` to perform spatial overlays with polygons (142)
- Addition of ``sjoin`` to perform spatial joins (115, 145, 188)
- Addition of ``__geo_interface__`` that returns a python data structure
to represent the ``GeoSeries`` as a GeoJSON-like ``FeatureCollection`` (116)
and ``iterfeatures`` method (178)
- Addition of the ``explode`` (146) and ``dissolve`` (310, 311) methods.
- Addition of the ``sindex`` attribute, a Spatial Index using the optional
dependency ``rtree`` (``libspatialindex``) that can be used to speed up
certain operations such as overlays (140, 141).
- Addition of the ``GeoSeries.cx`` coordinate indexer to slice a GeoSeries based
on a bounding box of the coordinates (55).
- Improvements to plotting: ability to specify edge colors (173), support for
the ``vmin``, ``vmax``, ``figsize``, ``linewidth`` keywords (207), legends
for chloropleth plots (210), color points by specifying a colormap (186) or
a single color (238).
- Larger flexibility of ``to_crs``, accepting both dicts and proj strings (289)
- Addition of embedded example data, accessible through
``geopandas.datasets.get_path``.

API changes:

- In the ``plot`` method, the ``axes`` keyword is renamed to ``ax`` for
consistency with pandas, and the ``colormap`` keyword is renamed to ``cmap``
for consistency with matplotlib (208, 228, 240).

Bug fixes:

- Properly handle rows with missing geometries (139, 193).
- Fix ``GeoSeries.to_json`` (263).
- Correctly serialize metadata when pickling (199, 206).
- Fix ``merge`` and ``concat`` to return correct GeoDataFrame (247, 320, 322).