v0.4.0

GeoPandas 0.4.0 improves the overlay functionality (much better performance, and fixed behaviour for certain cases). This can possibly change results you obtained before, but likely more correct now. But given this change, please test and feedback welcome!
Further, there is a long list of other new features and bug fixes, see 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 (pip install 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 functionalty (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)

Acknowledgments

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!
A total of 26 people contributed to this release. People with a "+" by their
names contributed a patch for the first time.

• Aleksey Bilogur
• Andrew Feierman +
• Benjamin Root +
• Chris Holdgraf
• Christopher Ren +
• Dani Arribas-Bel
• Dmitri Lebedev +
• Edward Betts +
• Elliott Sales de Andrade +
• Fabien Maussion +
• Filipe +
• François Leblanc +
• Geir Arne Hjelle +
• James McBride
• Joris Van den Bossche
• Joshua Wilson +
• Levi John Wolf +
• Ramiro Gómez +
• Robert Gieseke +
• Rutger Hofste +
• Tim Tröndle
• balmandhunter +
• mrahim +
• pinto531 +
• robochat +
• Ömer Özak +

v0.3.0

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)

v0.2.1

RLS: v0.2.1