Cannot get plot() in geopandas to produce a map of the GeoDataFrame

Question

I have installed all the necessary and optional modules for geopandas (with the exception of rtree) as listed at http://geopandas.org/install.html

I am following the tutorials from this site and also from a couple of other bloggers such as https://borealperspectives.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/plotting-polygon-shapefiles-on-a-matplotlib-basemap-with-geopandas-shapely-and-descartes/

Here they simply use .plot() to produce a map. However when I follow I get

>>> world.plot()
<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot object at 0x0BB0F910>

No window with a map pops up. Here's the code snippet that should work.

>>> import geopandas as gpd
>>> world = gpd.read_file(gpd.datasets.get_path('naturalearth_lowres'))
>>> world.plot()
<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot object at 0x0BB0F910>

List of versions:

• Python 2.7.13 on Windows 7 Professional
• geopandas 0.2.1
• numpy 1.11.3
• pandas 0.19.2
• shapely 1.5.17
• fiona 1.7.1
• six 1.10.0
• pyproj 1.9.5.1
• geopy 1.11.0
• psycopg2 2.6.2 (dt dec pq3 ext)
• matplotlib 1.5.3
• descartes 1.0.2

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The examples provided are for executing the scripts in a Jupyter/IPython notebooks environment.

In a normal Python environment, you need to import matplotlib to show the image

import geopandas as gpd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

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

plt.show()