🐛 Bug: Incompatibility with newer pandas versions

[DoraWu]

Summary

While working with Ranch alongside Network Wrangler, I encountered compatibility issues due to deprecated pandas functionality used in Ranch. These deprecated APIs no longer work with newer pandas versions (>= 2.x), which are required by Network Wrangler.

Context

• Network Wrangler requires: pandas >= 2.2.x
• Ranch appears to rely on older pandas APIs that have been deprecated/removed in recent pandas versions
• This creates a dependency conflict and runtime errors when using both packages in the same environment

Issue

Some pandas code in Ranch uses deprecated functionality that is no longer supported in newer pandas versions. As a result:

• Ranch fails when used with pandas >= 2.x
• Downgrading pandas to support Ranch causes incompatibility with Network Wrangler

Example Error / Behavior

AttributeError: 'DataFrame' object has no attribute 'append'

Suggested Fix

Update deprecated pandas usage to modern equivalents, for example:

• Replace DataFrame.append() with pd.concat()
• Review other deprecated APIs per pandas 2.x migration guide