gis calculate distance between point and polygon / border

Question

I want to calculate the distance between a point and the border of a country using python / shapely. It should work just fine point.distance(poly) e.g. demonstrated here Find Coordinate of Closest Point on Polygon Shapely but using geopandas I face the issue of: 'GeoSeries' object has no attribute '_geom'

What is wrong in my handling of the data? My border dataset is from http://www.gadm.org/

Is `austriaBorders.geometry` really a shapely geometry? please, execute `print type(austriaBorders.geometry)` — eguaio, Oct 12 '16 at 12:38
so it the output of your command is geopandas.geoseries.GeoSeries — Georg Heiler, Oct 12 '16 at 12:46

eguaio · Accepted Answer · 2016-10-12T13:02:48.250

According to geopandas documentation, a GeoSeries is a vector of geometries (in your case, 0 (POLYGON... tells that you have just one object, but it is still a vector). There should be a way of getting the first geometry element. GeoSeries class implements the __getitem__ method, so austriaBorders.geometry[0] should give you the geometry you need. So, try with point.distance(austriaBorders.geometry[0]).

If you only need the distance to a point, the GeoSeries has the distance method implemented, but it will return a vector with the distance to each geometry it contains (according to documentation).

indeed [0] is shapely.geometry.multipolygon.MultiPolygon – Georg Heiler Oct 12 '16 at 13:20 — Georg Heiler, Oct 12 '16 at 13:20

gis calculate distance between point and polygon / border

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