The fiber of persistent homology for trees

Consider the space of continuous functions on a geometric tree $X$ whose persistent homology gives rise to a finite generic barcode $D$. We show that there are exactly as many path connected components in this space as there are merge trees whose barcode is $D$. We find that each component is homotopy equivalent to a configuration space on $X$ with specialized constraints encoded by the merge tree. For barcodes $D$ with either one or two intervals, our method also allows us to compute the homotopy type of this space of functions.