Compositions of birational endomorphisms of the affine plane

Let A^2 denote the affine plane over an algebraically closed field of arbitrary characteristic. Besides contributing several new results in the general theory of birational endomorphisms of A^2, this article describes certain classes of birational endomorphisms f defined by requiring that the missing curves or contracting curves of f are lines. The last part of the article is concerned with the monoid structure of the set of birational endomorphisms of A^2.