Conda no longer able to build from yaml file

[tsherwen]

Conda appears to no longer be able to build the base environment from the shipped yaml file.

To resolve this, a few modules just used for more complex polygon geospatial masking have been dropped (listed below; #121) in the default yaml file provided. The choice for Conda channels was updated to use 'defaults' instead of 'conda-forge' too (commit #120).

• geopandas
• affine
• rasterio
• proj4
• geos

These changes mean that Conda can now again quickly make the base environment from the yaml file using the standard approach (below & detailed on Conda's website)

conda env create -f environment.yml

A long term solution to allow for the polygon masking to be used again still needs to be tested and implemented. In the meantime, the user will have to simply install these additional packages if they wish to use the functions that require them.

Various other dependencies could be swapped for core distributions and/or more up to date packages on (e.g. wget, requests, BeautifulSoup). Other less used packages (e.g. xesmf) could be encouraged to be installed as required.

[kilicomu]

You may want to experiment with a Python later than 3.7 for improved environment solvability.