Generating cycle spaces for graphs on surfaces with small genera

In this paper we investigate cycle base structures of a 2-(edge)-connected graph on surfaces with small genera and show that short cycles do generate the cycle spaces in the case of “small face-embeddings”. Examples show that the conditions in our main results are best possible. As applications we find the exact formulae for the minimum lengths of cycle bases of some types of graphs which conclude several known results. Finally, we generalize those results for graphs embedded on general orientable surfaces.