Verify if a point is Land or Water in Google Maps

Question

..and then Google-maps \"divide the waters from the waters\"

Well, not in the biblical sense but..

I would like to know what options I have in order to verif

Answer 1

As a complete novice to Python I couldn't get SylvainB's solution to work with the python script that checks if coordinates are on land. I managed to figure it out however, by downloading OSGeo4W (https://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/) and then installed everything I needed pip, Ipython, and checked that all the imports specified were there. I saved the following code as a .py file.

Code to check if coordinates are on land

###make sure you check these are there and working separately before using the .py file 

import ogr
from IPython import embed
from osgeo import osr
import osgeo

import random
#####generate a 1000 random coordinates
ran1= [random.uniform(-180,180) for x in range(1,1001)]
ran2= [random.uniform(-180,180) for x in range(1,1001)]


drv = ogr.GetDriverByName('ESRI Shapefile') #We will load a shape file
ds_in = drv.Open("D:\Downloads\land-polygons-complete-4326\land-polygons-complete-4326\land_polygons.shp")    #Get the contents of the shape file
lyr_in = ds_in.GetLayer(0)    #Get the shape file's first layer

#Put the title of the field you are interested in here
idx_reg = lyr_in.GetLayerDefn().GetFieldIndex("P_Loc_Nm")

#If the latitude/longitude we're going to use is not in the projection
#of the shapefile, then we will get erroneous results.
#The following assumes that the latitude longitude is in WGS84
#This is identified by the number "4236", as in "EPSG:4326"
#We will create a transformation between this and the shapefile's
#project, whatever it may be
geo_ref = lyr_in.GetSpatialRef()
point_ref=osgeo.osr.SpatialReference()
point_ref.ImportFromEPSG(4326)
ctran=osgeo.osr.CoordinateTransformation(point_ref,geo_ref)
###check if the random coordinates are on land
def check(runs):
    lon=ran1[runs]
    lat=ran2[runs]
    #Transform incoming longitude/latitude to the shapefile's projection
    [lon,lat,z]=ctran.TransformPoint(lon,lat)
    #Create a point
    pt = ogr.Geometry(ogr.wkbPoint)
    pt.SetPoint_2D(0, lon, lat)
    #Set up a spatial filter such that the only features we see when we
    #loop through "lyr_in" are those which overlap the point defined above
    lyr_in.SetSpatialFilter(pt)
    #Loop through the overlapped features and display the field of interest
    for feat_in in lyr_in:
        return(lon, lat)

###give it a try
result = [check(x) for x in range(1,11)] ###checks first 10 coordinates

I tried to get it to work in R but I had a nightmare trying to get all the packages you need to install so stuck to python.