I am trying to install Fiona into a cloned conda environment in ArcGIS Pro. I have cloned the default environment and tried to install it both through ArcGIS and through the conda prompt (through default channel setup and specifying conda-forge). I have tried cloning an environment, removing everything except arcgis and arcgispro and then reinstalling gdal/fiona/geopandas.
Everything I try results in an ImportError (or worse):
>>> import fiona
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\envs\dev_37\lib\site-packages\fiona\__init__.py", line 83, in <module>
from fiona.collection import BytesCollection, Collection
File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\envs\dev_37\lib\site-packages\fiona\collection.py", line 9, in <module>
from fiona.ogrext import Iterator, ItemsIterator, KeysIterator
ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified module could not be found.
I am experienced using conda outside of ArcGIS and have a few working conda environments for different purposes. However, I would like to have access to ArcPy and Fiona (really GeoPandas) in the same environment as I have one dataset that is very large and stored in a gdb and reading/writing with GeoPandas is way slower than with ArcPy, but I also have a large number of functions written in GeoPandas that I would prefer not to rewrite in ArcPy.
I believe the cause of the issue is that ArcGIS Pro uses a different (Esri) GDAL than you get from a typical install via anaconda or conda-forge:
gdal 2.3.3 arcgispro_1 [arcgispro] esri