Create closed polygon from boundary points

Question

I have an array of longitude-latitude points that defines the boundaries of an area. I would like to create a polygon based on these points and plot the polygon on a map and

Answer 1

There is a blog post here which talks about shapefiles and basemap: http://www.geophysique.be/2013/02/12/matplotlib-basemap-tutorial-10-shapefiles-unleached-continued/

If you're keen to try it out, cartopy might also be an option. Plotting data from a shapefile is designed to be fairly easy:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

import cartopy.crs as ccrs
import cartopy.io.shapereader as shpreader

# pick a shapefile - Cartopy makes it easy to access Natural Earth
# shapefiles, but it could be anything
shapename = 'admin_1_states_provinces_lakes_shp'
states_shp = shpreader.natural_earth(resolution='110m',
                                      category='cultural', name=shapename)

.

# states_shp is just a filename to a shapefile
>>> print states_shp
/Users/pelson/.local/share/cartopy/shapefiles/natural_earth/cultural/110m_admin_1_states_provinces_lakes_shp.shp

.

# Create the mpl axes of a PlateCarree map
ax = plt.axes(projection=ccrs.PlateCarree())

# Read the shapes from the shapefile into a list of shapely geometries.
geoms = shpreader.Reader(states_shp).geometries()

# Add the shapes in the shapefile to the axes
ax.add_geometries(geoms, ccrs.PlateCarree(),
                  facecolor='coral', edgecolor='black')

plt.show()