How to get maps to geopandas after datasets are removed?

Question

I have found very easy and useful to load world map from geopandas datasets, as probably many others, for example:

import geopandas as gpd

world = gpd.read_file(gpd.datasets.get_path('naturalearth_lowres'))

However, this gives a FutureWarning that dataset module is deprecated and will be removed in the future. There are maps available for download, for example from https://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/110m-cultural-vectors/ but the files are zipped and it does not seem like a convinient workflow to either get and process files from there or neither include processed files with the source.

Is there an alternative? What is the best way to do this, especially if I want my code to work with future versions of Geopandas?

Answer 1

The simplest solution would be to download/store the shapefile somewhere.

That being said, if (for some reason), you need to read it from the source, you can do it this way :

import fsspec

url = "https://www.naturalearthdata.com/http//www.naturalearthdata.com/" \
      "download/110m/cultural/ne_110m_admin_0_countries.zip"
    
with fsspec.open(f"simplecache::{url}") as file:
    gdf = gpd.read_file(file)

Output :

          featurecla  scalerank  ...     FCLASS_UA                            geometry
0    Admin-0 country          1  ...          None  MULTIPOLYGON (((180.00000 -16.0...
1    Admin-0 country          1  ...          None  POLYGON ((33.90371 -0.95000, 34...
2    Admin-0 country          1  ...          None  POLYGON ((-8.66559 27.65643, -8...
..               ...        ...  ...           ...                                 ...
174  Admin-0 country          1  ...  Unrecognized  POLYGON ((20.59025 41.85541, 20...
175  Admin-0 country          1  ...          None  POLYGON ((-61.68000 10.76000, -...
176  Admin-0 country          1  ...          None  POLYGON ((30.83385 3.50917, 29....

[177 rows x 169 columns]