AcadGIS

Publication-ready study area maps for research — in a few lines of Python.

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AcadGIS is a Python package (and a no-code web app) for making publication-ready study area maps, choropleth and the full thematic-map catalogue, locator insets, terrain relief, raster & vector layers, satellite basemaps and river maps — for research papers, theses and reports. Name a place, add your data, and export a journal-ready figure in a few lines: no QGIS, ArcGIS or shapefiles required. Everything works through a single import acadgis as agis.

import acadgis as agis

sa = agis.StudyArea("Iraq").zoom_into("Babil")
sa.figure(suptitle="Study Area: Babil Governorate, Iraq")
sa.save("study_area.png", dpi=300)

Gallery

_{Curated raster & satellite (NDVI · land cover · DEM · basemaps · roads) · study-area layouts · sea/ocean · choropleth · isopleth / isolines · dot-density · world thematic maps — every figure made with import acadgis as agis.}

Install

pip install acadgis                 # core (offline demo data + plotting)
pip install "acadgis[full]"         # + live download, fuzzy matching, terrain, drainage

Optional extras: acadgis[download] (any-country boundaries via pygadm), acadgis[match] (fuzzy names), acadgis[terrain] (DEM relief), acadgis[drainage] (streams from a DEM). Bangladesh, Iraq, India and the USA ship bundled — everything works offline.

What it does

• Boundaries on demand — country, state, district and sub-district, by name, from GADM.
• One-line styled maps — 12 palettes, 6 themes, north arrows, scale bars, checker borders, graticules and legends.
• Choropleths and graduated symbols with automatic name matching (Chittagong matches Chattogram, dropped admin-suffixes, diacritics) and mapclassify schemes.
• Locator insets — the country to region to detail figure with connecting arrows.
• Layout presets — study_area() builds the whole multi-panel figure in one call (single, two, cascade, series, grid) with uniform or custom panel sizes, customizable connectors and region highlighting.
• Terrain — shaded relief and hypsometric tint from Copernicus GLO-30 (no API key), with realistic land-to-ocean colouring.
• Hydrology — Natural Earth or dense OpenStreetMap river networks and water bodies.
• Sea / ocean — sea=True (or agis.add_sea) draws a clean ocean around coastal countries (source="ne10m" for crisp coasts); sliver-free, landlocked is a no-op.
• Drainage — stream networks extracted from a DEM.
• Layers — add_raster (any GeoTIFF: continuous / categorical / RGB), add_layer (any vector, auto-styled, label control), add_basemap/add_satellite (6 tile styles), add_topography, add_cities, add_roads, and curated real data: add_landcover (ESA WorldCover 10 m) + add_ndvi (Sentinel-2).
• Thematic maps — the full catalogue: heat maps (add_heatmap), interpolated isopleth surfaces and labelled isolines (interpolate_field → add_isopleth/add_contours), dot-density (dot_density), bivariate choropleths with a 2-D legend (bivariate), Dorling / non-contiguous cartograms (cartogram).
• Export — PNG, PDF or SVG at any DPI.

Quick start

import acadgis as agis

gdf = agis.load_boundaries("Bangladesh", level="district")     # auto-download + cache
agis.plot(gdf, palette="spectral", title="Bangladesh — Districts")

agis.choropleth(gdf, df, value="incidence", palette="magma")   # messy names welcome

ax = agis.plot(gdf, highlight="Comilla")
agis.points(ax, survey_df, value="value", size_by="value", cmap="magma", legend=True)

dem = agis.load_dem("Bagrote Valley")
agis.relief(dem, hillshade=True, ocean_color="#cce5f0")

agis.study_area("Bangladesh",                                  # whole layout, one call
    steps=[("division", "Dhaka"), ("district", "Madaripur")],
    template="cascade", terrain=True)

Links and attribution

• Web app: https://acadgis.com
• Documentation: https://doc.acadgis.com
• Source: https://github.com/riponcm/AcadGIS
• Data: GADM (boundaries), Copernicus GLO-30 (terrain), Natural Earth and OpenStreetMap (hydrography). Free for academic and non-commercial use — please cite the sources.
• Built with projectmem — the persistent memory + workflow layer used to develop AcadGIS.

License

Apache License 2.0.