matplotliblegendorientationgeopandas

Cannot Rotate Legend Horizontally in GeoPandas


I am trying to plot California counties and color them by their FIPS code. The sample code from the GeoPandas website is:

chicago.plot(
    column="POP2010",
    legend=True,
    legend_kwds={"label": "Population in 2010", "orientation": "horizontal"},
)

That code works. My code is

ca_counties.plot(column='COUNTYFP',
                 legend=True, 
                 legend_kwds={"label": "FIPS", "orientation": "horizontal"},
                )

That code returns an error message that TypeError: Legend.__init__() got an unexpected keyword argument 'label'. Unless I am going crazy, the spelling of "orientation" is correct and everything else matches. I have also removed the comma after the } but that does not work. I am able to plot ca.counties with the "FIPS" label as well as use the ``loc" keyword to move the legend around. It is only when I try to change the orientation that I have a problem.

Since the chicago example works, I do not think it is something with the version of geopandas and matplotlib I have installed. I updated them anyway.

In case it matters, I am using JupyterLab via Anaconda Navigator. The error exists whether I execute the code from the cell or paste it into the console and execute in the console.

What am I misunderstanding?


Solution

  • I started to make a MWE script and in so doing figured out the problem. COUNTYFP was an object dtype, so matplotlib was creating discrete colors. For a reason I don't understand, orientation only works for colorbars. Chaning COUNTYFP to numeric data solved the problem.