Introduction to Focus Issue: Lagrangian Coherent Structures

The topic of Lagrangian coherent structures (LCS) has been a rapidly growing area of research in nonlinear dynamics for almost a decade. It provides a means to rigorously define and detect transport barriers in dynamical systems with arbitrary time dependence and has a wealth of applications, particularly to fluid flow problems. Here, we give a short introduction to the topic of LCS and review the new work presented in this Focus Issue.