I heard about a new (to me) tool for viewing shapefiles on this site. It required the installation of basemap which is a part of matplotlib, but the installation turned out to be a little tricky. I found a solution at the blog, I Lessen Data, which pointed me to another interesting post on mapping, So You’d Like to Make a Map Using Python.

Installing Basemap

Your gut reaction is to use sudo pip install basemap, but that doesn’t quite work. You have to call,

pip install basemap --allow-external basemap --allow-unverified basemap

An Example

I downloaded this zip-file containing soil data, and then executed the following code,

from mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap

mp = Basemap(llcrnrlat=25,
             urcrnrlat=37,
             llcrnrlon=-107,
             urcrnrlon=-93,
             resolution='c')

mp.drawmapboundary()

mp.readshapefile(shapefile='~/Downloads/gsmsoil_tx/spatial/gsmsoilmu_a_tx',name='tc') ;
savefig( "tx_soil_map.png", dpi=200 )

Or we can look at a smaller region by editing the llcrnrlat etc. arguments. These stand for upper and lower, and right and left corner, latitudes and longitudes.

mp = Basemap(llcrnrlat=30,
             urcrnrlat=32,
             llcrnrlon=-103,
             urcrnrlon=-101,
             resolution='c')

mp.drawmapboundary()

mp.readshapefile(shapefile='~/Downloads/gsmsoil_tx/spatial/gsmsoilmu_a_tx',name='tc') ;
savefig( "permian_soil_map.png", dpi=200 )