Adding geography

This section describes how to add coastline and water features along with adding political boundaries.

How to add coastline and water features

We will begin by drawing coastlines using the following code:

# Just coastlines
m = Basemap(projection='ortho',lon_0=-114, lat_0=51)
m.drawcoastlines()
plt.show()

In the previous sections, we have seen that basemap can generate a sort of background image of coastlines of the globe, but we haven't seen how this is done. It is done simply by using the coastlines method in the preceding snippet. Using this gives us the coastlines, as shown in the following output:

In our preceding output, we see that the coastlines are fairly coarse. We can change how coarse...