Abstract: In order to efficiently manipulate the geometry and topology information of virtual plants,which includes boundary and non-manifold edges,a more compact representation of the topology information was proposed.The proposed data structure makes full use of the implicit representations among vertices,half-edges and triangular faces.The index of the face and the implied number of the half-edge are encoded into an unsigned long integer based on half-edge data structure.The position information and an outgoing half-edge are set as attributes in the vertex object,the vertex pointer and the opposite half-edge list are set as attributes in the triangular face object.The topology information of the mesh can be efficiently queried and processed by decoding the half-edges in mapping table.The test of the topological reconstruction for virtual plant was done.Compared with other half-edge data structures,the memory footprint of the proposed data structure is reduced.