Coloring, sparseness, and girth
  An $r$-augmented tree is a rooted tree plus $r$ edges added from each leaf to ancestors. For $d,g,r\in\mathbb{N}$, we construct a bipartite $r$-augmented complete $d$-ary tree having girth at least $g$. The height of such trees must grow extremely rapidly in terms of the girth.   Using the resulting graphs, we construct sparse non-$k$-choosable bipartite graphs, showing that maximum average degree at most $2(k-1)$ is a sharp sufficient condition for $k$-choosability in bipartite graphs, even when requiring large girth. We also give a new simple construction of non-$k$-colorable graphs and hypergraphs with any girth $g$. 
Noga Alon, Alexandr Kostochka, Benjamin Reiniger, Douglas B. West,   Xuding Zhu
math.CO