Error `No handles with labels` when trying to relocate geopandas legend

Question

My plot works fine as long as I do not attempt to change the location of its legend. (I am plotting a GeoDataFrame.)

# %%
ax = NE_shp.plot(column=NE_shp.iloc[:,4], figsize=(10,3), scheme='quantiles', edgecolor='k', k=10, legend=True)

#ax.legend(loc='upper left', bbox_to_anchor=(1, 1)) #This is the line for relocating legend

ax.set_title('The Map', fontsize=16)
ax.axis('off')

the resulted figure:

But when I use the line that now is masked as a comment, to change the legend position, it gives the following error and the legend is not shown as the figure below

No handles with labels found to put in legend.

(I suspect if it has something to do with scheme='quantiles' cause it is not inherent of matplotlib and is added by pySAL.)

Thank you very much for your suggestions.

Answer 1

GeoDataFrame.plot provides a legend_kwds argument, which expects a dictionary. This dictionary will be passed on to either .legend or .colorbar, depending on what kind of plot you produce. So the arguments loc='upper left', bbox_to_anchor=(1, 1) will need to go into that dictionary like

gdf.plot(..., legend=True, legend_kwds=dict(loc='upper left', bbox_to_anchor=(1, 1)))

Complete runnable example:

import geopandas as gpd
print(gpd.__version__)   ## 0.5
import numpy as np; np.random.seed(42)
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt 

gdf = gpd.read_file(gpd.datasets.get_path('naturalearth_lowres')) 
gdf['quant']=np.random.rand(len(gdf))*100-20

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(9,4))
fig.subplots_adjust(right=0.7)
gdf.plot(column='quant', scheme='quantiles', edgecolor='k', k=10, 
         legend=True, legend_kwds=dict(loc='upper left', bbox_to_anchor=(1, 1)), ax=ax)

plt.show()