The following script can be used to create a choropleth map that shows the total wildfires in the US from 1984-2015, based on total count per state. We can use the MTBS with fire data that was introduced in Chapter 4, Data Types, Storage, and Conversion, which gives us point data of all of the wildfire occurrences from 1984-2015. We can use the state field of the wildfire data to map the wildfire occurrences by state. But, we choose here to overlay the data on a separate shapefile with state geometries, to illustrate the use of a spatial join. Next, we'll count the total wildfires per state and map the results. GeoPandas can be used to accomplish all of these tasks.
We start with importing the module: ...
