Local limit of labeled trees and expected volume growth in a random quadrangulation

Exploiting a bijective correspondence between planar quadrangulations and well-labeled trees, we define an ensemble of infinite surfaces as a limit of uniformly distributed ensembles of quadrangulations of fixed finite volume. The limit random surface can be described in terms of a birth and death process and a sequence of multitype Galton--Watson trees. As a consequence, we find that the expected volume of the ball of radius $r$ around a marked point in the limit random surface is $\Theta(r^4)$.