| Summary: | [Extract from the Preface] The 12th International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS 2012), held in Cairns, Queensland, Australia from July 9-13th, 2012, was attended by nearly 2000 delegates. The program included over 1500 talks and posters. We are pleased to present the Proceedings, which contains almost 200 contributions from scientists around the world arising from the Symposium. The Proceedings encompass a broad spectrum of coral reef science, and demonstrates a growing expansion from the biological and earth sciences to non-traditional disciplines, including the social sciences and economics. The trend in earlier ICRS Symposia, towards a larger contribution from the fields of conservation planning and management, continued in Cairns in 2012. The Symposium also included an increased focus on climate change and ocean acidification, as well as reef management and governance issues including the Coral Triangle Initiative. For the first time in the history of ICRS Symposia, the organizers of the meeting invited submission of manuscripts for peer review prior to the Symposium so that delegates could receive the Proceedings when they arrive at the Symposium. We hope the benefits of rapid publication will allow prompt dissemination of the latest breakthroughs in coral reef science, and stimulate further advances in the knowledge necessary for sustaining the world's coral reefs. An additional advantage of rapid publication is the benefit of immediately placing the Proceedings online on the ICRS 2012 website (http://www.icrs2012.com/), where it is freely accessible to a global audience. The Symposium website will also archive many other outcomes of ICRS 2012, including video recordings of the Plenary Talks. We thank the WorldFish Center in Penang, Malaysia, for agreeing to upload the ICRS 2012 Proceedings to ReefBase (http://www.reefbase.org) along with earlier ICRS Symposia.
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