spatial-distance-to-boundary

name	spatial-distance-to-boundary
description	Calculate the shortest distance between points (earthquakes) and a complex line geometry (plate boundaries).

To find the distance from points to a boundary:

1. Isolate the boundary geometry. This can be the boundary of a plate polygon (plate_gdf.geometry.boundary) or a separate LineString dataset.
2. If the boundary consists of multiple segments, use .union_all() (in GeoPandas 1.0+) or .unary_union to create a single geometry object for comparison.
3. Use the .distance() method on the points GeoDataFrame against the unified boundary geometry.
4. To find the point furthest from the boundary, use .loc[gdf['distance_col'].idxmax()].

# Create a single geometry representing the boundary
boundary_geom = boundaries_gdf.union_all()

# Calculate distance for each row
gdf['dist_to_boundary'] = gdf.geometry.distance(boundary_geom)

# Find the record with the maximum distance
furthest_record = gdf.loc[gdf['dist_to_boundary'].idxmax()]