Tree approximation in quasi-trees

In this paper, we investigate the geometric properties of quasi-trees and prove some equivalent criteria. We give a general construction of a tree that approximates the ends of a geodesic space, and use this to prove that every quasi-tree is (1,C)-quasi-isometric to a simplicial tree. As a consequence, we show that Gromov's tree approximation lemma for hyperbolic spaces (1987) can be improved in the case of quasi-trees to give a uniform approximation for any set of points, independent of cardinality. From this we show that having uniform tree approximation for finite subsets is equivalent to being able to uniformly approximate the entire space by a tree. As another consequence, we note that the boundary of a quasi-tree is isometric to the boundary of its approximating tree under a certain choice of visual metric, and that this gives a natural extension of the standard metric on the boundary of a tree.