As of August 2022 Gopandas is not automatically installed in Google’s Colab and the first you need to do is to install it by running a cell with the content “!pip install geopandas”. This will automatically install two other key libraries namely finona and GDAL. These libraries are primarily concerned with reading and writing data files.

one of the relay nice things about GDAL/fiona is that data can be loaded directly from GitHub using the vsicurl (virtual filesystem) prefix as seen in the example below.

test = gpd.read_file(‘/vsicurl/https://github.com/Toblerity/Fiona/raw/master/tests/data/gre.shp’)