rmania

# Often when reading in a ShapeFile from Basemap, you'll get: "ValueError: readshapefile can only handle 2D shape types"
# A trick can be to convert your geometry in your GeoPandas Dataframe and restoring the new flattened 2D geometry
# series back into a shapefile and try again.

# edit from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33417764/basemap-readshapefile-valueerror  

from shapely.geometry import Polygon, MultiPolygon, shape, Point
import geopandas as gp
def convert_3D_2D(geometry):
    '''