EarthPy: A Python package that makes it easier to explore and plot raster and vector data using open source Python tools.

Abstract

& Purpose EarthPy makes commonly performed spatial data exploration tasks easier for scientist by building upon functions in the widely used packages: Rasterio and GeoPandas. EarthPy is designed for users who are new to Python and spatial data with a focus on scientific data. When a user is working with spatial data for research, there are a suite of data exploration activities that are often performed including: 1. Viewing histograms and plots of single bands within a remote sensing image to explore potential calibration and other data quality issues. 2. Creating basemaps that have legends with unique symbology. 3. Creating plots of images with colorbars. 4. Rendering RGB (and other composite) images of multi band spectral remote sensing images. 5. Masking clouds from a remote sensing image. 6. Limiting geographic extent of spatial data The above operations are crucial to understanding a dataset and identifying issues that may need to be addressed with further data processing when beginning an analysis. In the R world, these tasks are quickly performed using the raster and sp packages. However, there isn't a tool that makes these tasks easy for users in the Python open source package landscape.