Draw a map of a specific country with cartopy?

Question

I have tried this example from the Cartopy gallery, which works fine. But how do I focus on another country, i.e. show only Germany?

I've tried some coordinates on the extend() method, but I didn't manage to get to look it like the US map. Or do I have to modify the shape file?

score 32 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 21 '14 at 14:49

32

Using the Global Administrative Areas dataset at http://www.gadm.org/country, just download the Germany dataset and use cartopy's shapereader (in the same way as is done in the linked example).

A short-self contained example:

import cartopy.crs as ccrs
import cartopy.io.shapereader as shpreader
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Downloaded from http://biogeo.ucdavis.edu/data/gadm2/shp/DEU_adm.zip
fname = '/downloads/DEU/DEU_adm1.shp'

adm1_shapes = list(shpreader.Reader(fname).geometries())

ax = plt.axes(projection=ccrs.PlateCarree())

plt.title('Deutschland')
ax.coastlines(resolution='10m')

ax.add_geometries(adm1_shapes, ccrs.PlateCarree(),
                  edgecolor='black', facecolor='gray', alpha=0.5)

ax.set_extent([4, 16, 47, 56], ccrs.PlateCarree())

plt.show()

Output from code

HTH

answered Aug 21 '14 at 14:49

pelson

21,252
4
92
99

15

An answer from the creator of Cartopy himself -- gotta love Stack Overflow. – John Powell Aug 22 '14 at 14:44
Is there a way to label country names in cartopy? – Borealis Aug 15 '19 at 01:45
So what if I want to merge Germany and the Netherlands. Can I somehow merge the shape files to show two countries and mask the rest out? – Linda Nov 12 '20 at 10:51

score 17 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 19 '17 at 10:41

Let me just ad an example using the data from naturalearthdata. So it is possible to extend this to any country.

from cartopy.io import shapereader
import numpy as np
import geopandas
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

import cartopy.crs as ccrs

# get natural earth data (http://www.naturalearthdata.com/)

# get country borders
resolution = '10m'
category = 'cultural'
name = 'admin_0_countries'

shpfilename = shapereader.natural_earth(resolution, category, name)

# read the shapefile using geopandas
df = geopandas.read_file(shpfilename)

# read the german borders
poly = df.loc[df['ADMIN'] == 'Germany']['geometry'].values[0]

ax = plt.axes(projection=ccrs.PlateCarree())

ax.add_geometries(poly, crs=ccrs.PlateCarree(), facecolor='none', 
                  edgecolor='0.5')

ax.set_extent([5, 16, 46.5, 56], crs=ccrs.PlateCarree())

This yields the following figure:

As of cartopy 0.18 I had to change `ax.add_geometries(poly, ...)` to `ax.add_geometries([poly] ...)` — JoeZuntz, Apr 04 '21 at 10:09

Draw a map of a specific country with cartopy?

2 Answers2

Linked