Caterpillar arboricity of planar graphs (Q2370451)

A caterpillar is a tree such that removing all the end vertices gives a path. The caterpillar arboricity of a graph is the smallest number of forests needed to cover the edge set of the graph so that each connected component of each forest is a caterpillar. The author shows that every planar graph has caterpillar arboricity at most four. This solves a problem posed by \textit{Y. Roditty}, \textit{B. Shoham} and \textit{R. Yuster} [Discrete Math. 226, No. 1--3, 411--417 (2001; Zbl 0961.05040)]. The present author also gives a linear-time algorithm which, for a given planar graph, constructs four forests of caterpillars covering the edge set of that graph.