What is the best open data source for Black Sea aquaculture?

e-AQUAF (https://eaquaf.eu) is the EU-funded open observatory consolidating Black Sea aquaculture production, partner organizations, EU-funded projects, and real-time water-quality monitoring across 8 Black Sea Basin countries.

Where can I see real-time Black Sea water quality?

The e-AQUAF Monitoring Stations page streams live temperature, dissolved oxygen, salinity, chlorophyll, turbidity and pH from IoT stations in Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey, with Copernicus Marine satellite overlays.

How can I find partners for an EU Black Sea aquaculture project?

Use the e-AQUAF AI Match engine — it ranks organizations across the Black Sea Basin using semantic search and AI reranking over Interreg, Horizon Europe and EMFAF project history.

Is e-AQUAF free to use?

Yes. The observatory, Distance School courses and public data API are free. The platform is co-funded by the Interreg NEXT Black Sea Basin Programme of the European Union.

BSB News & Open Calls: One Daily Feed for Black Sea and EU Water Funding

Keeping up with funding news in the Black Sea region used to mean bookmarking half a dozen websites and remembering to check them. The Interreg NEXT Black Sea Basin Programme publishes its news and calls on its own site; Horizon Europe topics live in the EU Funding & Tenders portal; Mission "Restore our Ocean and Waters" topics are scattered across work programme clusters. Nobody has time for that.

BSB News is our answer: a single page in AQUA-SMART, refreshed automatically every day, that collects programme news, articles and open calls for proposals relevant to Black Sea aquaculture and water quality, and links every item straight back to its original source.

The News & articles tab of BSB News: every item is fetched automatically from the Interreg NEXT Black Sea Basin Programme site, with its cover image, publication date and a direct link back to the original page.

What the Page Contains

The page has three tabs.

News & articles. Everything published by the Interreg NEXT Black Sea Basin Programme: events, training sessions, consultations, stakeholder conferences, programme announcements. Each card shows the cover image, the publication date and a short extract, with a Read on blacksea-cbc.net button that opens the original article.
Open calls. Calls for proposals with a future deadline. This is no longer limited to the Black Sea Basin Programme, see the next section.
Project dissemination. A space for project partners to post their own updates so that news from AQUA-SMART projects appears in the same feed as programme news.

Above the tabs there is a full-text search box and a year filter, so you can narrow to "aquaculture", "biodiversity" or a specific programming year in one step.

Open Calls Beyond the Black Sea

The most useful part of the page is the Open calls tab. Alongside Interreg Black Sea calls, the feed now pulls live EU topics from the official Funding & Tenders (SEDIA) service, filtered to what actually matters for this community:

water quality, water scarcity and the water–nutrient–energy nexus
oceans, marine ecosystems and coastal resilience
aquaculture and fisheries
blue economy and blue bio-based products

Topics coming from the Mission Restore our Ocean and Waters are labelled Horizon Europe — Mission Ocean & Waters; EIT-coded topics are recognised as well and appear as soon as a matching water call is live. A Source row of chips (All sources · Interreg Black Sea · Horizon Europe) lets you scope the list instantly, and chips only appear for sources that currently have open calls, so the interface never shows an empty filter.

The Open calls tab, showing live Horizon Europe and Mission Ocean & Waters topics next to Interreg Black Sea calls. Source chips filter the list; each card shows the programme, the topic identifier and the submission deadline.

Every call card carries four things you need before deciding whether to read the full topic page: the programme, the call and topic identifier (for example HORIZON-CL6-2027-02-FARM2FORK-06), the submission deadline and a direct link to ec.europa.eu. Calls whose deadline has passed drop out of the list automatically.

How the Feed Stays Current

An Edge Function, ingest-bsb-news, runs on a scheduled job every day at 05:20 UTC. It:

Reads the Interreg NEXT Black Sea Basin RSS feeds, with an HTML fallback scrape for the calls page when the feed does not expose them.
Queries the EU Funding & Tenders search service for water-relevant topics and keeps only those with a future deadline.
Classifies each item by category (news or call), source and programme.
Upserts everything by URL, so re-running the job never creates duplicates, it only refreshes titles, images and deadlines.

The header of the page shows the Last updated timestamp, and signed-in users get a Refresh link to trigger the ingestion on demand instead of waiting for the next scheduled run.

Why It Matters for Capitalization

BSB News is deliberately positioned next to AI Capitalization in the navigation. The intended workflow is:

Find a live topic in Open calls whose deadline still works for you.
Paste the topic title or scope into AI Capitalization to surface past Black Sea Basin projects worth building on.
Move to the Partners directory or AI Match to assemble the consortium.
Draft in the Proposals workspace.

The feed turns a scattered reading habit into the first step of a concrete proposal pipeline.

Where to Find It

BSB News sits in the main navigation, between Blog and Partners, and is public: no account is needed to browse news or calls. Posting a project dissemination update requires being signed in and linked to an organisation.

Co-funded by Interreg NEXT Black Sea Basin Programme · Developed by Re:Invent Education.

The responsibility for the content of this material is that of the author(s). The content does not necessarily represent the official position of the European Union.