Introduction to GIS in Python

GDAL is one of the most popular software libraries in C++ for working with GIS. Though, it has binding in Python, it is not very Pythonic. To operate GDAL in Python more easily, we have rasterio, a frontend to GDAL's rastering features; fiona, a frontend to GDAL's vector features; and pyproj a Python frontend to the Proj.4 library. This tutorial gives a short introduction to all three packages.

The tutorial is written in Jupyter/Ipython notebook. Start a session as follows:

$ ipython3 notebook

Browse and find and open the file course.ipynb.

Installation

The installation bellow assumes that the packages numpy, scipy and matplotlib are all installed. (See http://scipy.org/ for more information on these packages.)

The code used in the tutorial is all done in Python3. If your system uses Python2 by default, use pip3 instead of pip to install libraries.

Installation in Windows

Download GDAL from: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#gdal

Download Rasterio from: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#rasterio

Download Fiona from: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#fiona

Download Pyproj from: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#pyproj

Install binaries:

pip install -U pip
pip install GDAL-2.0.2-cp35-none-win32.whl
pip install rasterio-0.31.0-cp35-none-win32.whl
pip install Fiona-1.6.3-cp35-none-win32.whl
pip install pyproj-1.9.5-cp35-none-win32.whl

Installation in OSX

brew install gdal
pip install rasterio
pip install fiona
pip isntall pyproj

Installation in Ubuntu

Add PPA (not needed in 15.10):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ppa
sudo apt-get update

Install GDAL library:

sudo apt-get install libgdal1h gdal-bin libgdal-dev

Install packages:

sudo pip install rasterio
sudo pip install fiona
sudo pip install pyproj