Refined enumeration of $k$-plane trees and $k$-noncrossing trees

Abstract

A $k$-plane tree is a plane tree whose vertices are assigned labels between $1$ and $k$ in such a way that the sum of the labels along any edge is no greater than $k+1$. These trees are known to be related to $(k+1)$-ary trees, and they are counted by a generalised version of the Catalan numbers. We prove a surprisingly simple refined counting formula, where we count trees with a prescribed number of labels of each kind. Several corollaries are derived from this formula, and an analogous theorem is proven for $k$-noncrossing trees, a similarly defined family of labelled noncrossing trees that are related to $(2k+1)$-ary trees.