#TodayILearned that if you do a .dissolve() on a #geopandas #GeoDataFrame "by" a certain column, it becomes "an index" thus, kind of hidden. You can regain access to it with .reset_index()
Also, when merging two gdfs it can be useful to first select just the relevant columns from one of them, in order to preserve the geometry column of the other...
...at least this is how it looks like how it worked for me...















