Today I learned another way of parsing geo data formats in-memory, using geopandas.
As part of a running django web service, I wanted to request and parse a WFS respose, which comes back in GML format.
The solution to this is:
gpd.GeoDataFrame.from_features(fiona.BytesCollection(bytes_str))
This was pointed out by sal in this stackoverflow answer. Since I could not find it in the documentation, either in fiona and not in geopandas. I want to try now to add this there.