ABSTRACT
In this chapter we consider the problem of maintaining properties of a collection of vertex-disjoint trees that change over time as edges are added or deleted. The trees can be rooted or free, and vertices and edges may be associated with real-valued costs that may change as well. A straightforward solution would be to store explicitly with each vertex its parent and cost, if any: with this representation each update would cost only O(1) time, but answering queries would be typically proportional to the size or to the depth of the tree, which may be linear in the worst case. By representing the structure of the trees implicitly, one can reduce the query time while slightly increasing the update time. The typical achieved bounds are logarithmic in the number of vertices of the forest, either in the worst-case or amortized over a sequence of operations.
