Known Intersecting Polygons returning false for .intersects() in geopandas

Question

I have 2 geodataframes:

1. An original shapefile of water features read in as a geodataframe. (playas)
2. A gdf as a result of a convex_hull operation with only polygon geometries. (polygons)

There should be intersection between these two layers, but the following code returns an empty geodataframe:

aff_playas = playas[playas.intersects(polygons)]

I am trying to think of what the problem could be with these two layers. I believe it is one of the following:

• A projection inconsistency with the created hulls_gdf
• function failure due to how detailed, varied the playas layer is.

The two layers plotted below have similar extent and are verified to intersect in Qgis, ArcGIS. The third is the output from the intersects().

Answer 1

I have solved my problem. For some reason intersects() was not working between my two layers, even though they are shown to intersect. Here is my workaround:

sj = gpd.sjoin(playas, polygons, how='inner',op='intersects')
aff_playas = playas.geom_almost_equals(sj)
aff_playas = aff_playas[~aff_playas.index.duplicated()]
playa_subset = playas[aff_playas]

Since I couldn't get intersects() to work, I used spatial join and the geom_almost_equals function to subset the original layer to the same intended affect.

Answer 2

geopandas's .intersects works by comparing the two geodataframes based on the index values. It's an element wise comparison. If you want to compare 1 shape (eg: convex hull) against all the features, you can use your code as is, but you need to ensure that polygons is a shapely object (for example: union all the geoms to one multipolygon shapely object)

Answer 3

Below code work for me.

sj = gpd.sjoin(filter_street, buffer_project_dataframe, how='inner',op='intersects')

But make sure that, buffer_project_dataframe should be a geodataframe, geosereis is not working