Abstract: Application Level Multicast is a promising approach to overcome the deployment problems of IP level multicast. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to compute a set of n-1 backup multicast delivery trees from the default multicast tree. Each backup multicast tree is characterized by the fact that exactly one link of the default multicast tree is replaced by a backup link from the set of available links. The trees can be calculated individually by each of the nodes. The so-called backup multicast tree algorithm can calculate this set of trees with a complexity of O (m log n). This is identical to the complexity of well known minimum spanning tree algorithms. The backup multicast tree algorithm is the basis for the reduced multicast tree algorithm that can calculate a tree, which results from the default multicast tree by removing a particular node and by replacing the links of the removed node. We show mechanisms that can be used to choose these explicit backup trees.