We are pleased to announce a new release of GeoPandas!

GeoPandas 0.5.0 includes some improvements for writing files with fiona (better performance, better support for data types and mixed geometry types), along with many other new features and bug fixes, see the full list below.

GeoPandas can be installed with conda from the conda-forge channel (conda install -c conda-forge geopandas) or with pip assuming the dependencies are available for your platform or are already installed (pip install geopandas ).

Please report any issues, or request new features via our GitHub repository: https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/issues

*What is it?*

GeoPandas is an open source project to make working with geospatial data in python easier. GeoPandas combines the capabilities of pandas and shapely, providing geospatial operations in pandas and a high-level interface to multiple shapely geometries. GeoPandas enables you to easily do operations in python that would otherwise require a spatial database such as PostGIS.

Documentation can be found here: http://geopandas.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

*What's new?*

Improvements:

- Significant performance improvement (around 10x) for GeoDataFrame.iterfeatures, which also improves GeoDataFrame.to_file (#864 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/864). - File IO enhancements based on Fiona 1.8: - Support for writing bool dtype (#855 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/855) and datetime dtype, if the file format supports it (#728 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/728). - Support for writing dataframes with multiple geometry types, if the file format allows it (e.g. GeoJSON for all types, or ESRI Shapefile for Polygon+MultiPolygon) (#827 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/827, #867 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/issues/867, #870 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/870). - Compatibility with pyproj >= 2 (#962 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/962). - A new geopandas.points_from_xy() helper function to convert x and y coordinates to Point objects (#896 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/896). - The buffer and interpolate methods now accept an array-like to specify a variable distance for each geometry (#781 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/781). - Addition of a relate method, corresponding to the shapely method that returns the DE-9IM matrix (#853 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/853). - Plotting improvements: - Performance improvement in plotting by only flattening the geometries if there are actually 'Multi' geometries (#785 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/785). - Choropleths: access to all mapclassify classification schemes and addition of the classification_kwds keyword in the plot method to specify options for the scheme (#876 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/876). - Ability to specify a matplotlib axes object on which to plot the color bar with the cax keyword, in order to have more control over the color bar placement (#894 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/894). - Changed the default provider in geopandas.tools.geocode from Google (now requires an API key) to Geocode.Farm (#907 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/907, #975 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/975).

Bug fixes:

- Remove the edge in the legend marker (#807 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/807). - Fix the align method to preserve the CRS (#829 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/829). - Fix geopandas.testing.assert_geodataframe_equal to correctly compare left and right dataframes (#810 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/810). - Fix in choropleth mapping when the values contain missing values (#877 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/issues/877). - Better error message in sjoin if the input is not a GeoDataFrame (#842 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/842). - Fix in read_postgis to handle nullable (missing) geometries (#856 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/856). - Correctly passing through the parse_dates keyword in read_postgis to the underlying pandas method (#860 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/860). - Fixed the shape of Antarctica in the included demo dataset 'naturalearth_lowres' (by updating to the latest version) (#804 https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/issues/804).

*Acknowledgments*

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release! A total of 33 people contributed to this release. People with a "+" by their names contributed a patch for the first time.

- Andy Garfield + - Benjamin Goldenberg + - Brett Naul + - Brian Lewis + - Dmitry Nikolaev + - Dr Martin Black + - Filipe - Geir Arne Hjelle - Géraud + - Henry Walshaw + - James McBride - Jesse Pisel + - Joris Van den Bossche - Joshua Wilson - Justin Shenk + - Kris Vanhoof + - Leah Wasser + - Levi John Wolf - Martin Fleischmann + - Matthieu Viry + - Philipp Kats + - Pratap Vardhan + - Pulkit Maloo + - Raphael Delhome + - Sean Gillies - Simon Andersson + - TimoRoth + - Yohann Rebattu + - YuichiNotoya + - byrman + - lmmarsano + - Émile Nadeau + - Ömer Özak

*-- The GeoPandas developers*