SciTools/cartopy

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1615 stars · 398 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Cartopy is a Python package for cartographic projections and map drawing, built on top of Matplotlib, Pyproj, and Shapely. It provides object-oriented projection definitions, coordinate transformations between projections, and vector data handling for geospatial visualization.

Use cases

• draw maps with matplotlib in python
• plot data on a map with map projections
• transform coordinates between projections
• read shapefiles and plot polygons on a map
• create choropleth or geospatial visualizations
• add coastlines and country borders to plots
• visualize weather or climate data on a projected map

When to choose

• you need publication-quality maps in Python with Matplotlib integration
• you work with geospatial vector data like shapefiles and need projection support
• you want object-oriented control over map projections and transformations

When to avoid

• you need interactive web-based maps (use folium or leaflet instead)
• you need full GIS analysis capabilities rather than visualization (use geopandas or QGIS)
• your project does not use Matplotlib as its plotting backend

Facets

library · maturity stable

data-visualization geospatial image-processing data-visualization data-science graphics python cross-platform cartography matplotlib map-projections shapefile shapely pyproj gis maps

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="SciTools/cartopy")