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ABSTRACT

The BlackSea4Fish Project Steering Committee (SC) Meeting was held in Constanta, Romania and hybrid on 24 July 2025. It aimed to update the SC members on the advances made by the BlackSea4Fish project since the last meeting held in July 2024, discuss the BlackSea4Fish work plan for the 2025–2026 intersession and reflect on BlackSea4Fish Project functioning, including an update on focal points. The meeting was attended by the SC national focal points from EU-Bulgaria, EU-Romania, Georgia, Türkiye and Ukraine, as well as the European Union, additional country experts, the BlackSea4Fish project team and other staff of the GFCM Secretariat. The SC reviewed the progress of ongoing activities, including the all-of-Black Sea standardized scientific beam trawl and demersal trawl surveys, age-reading workshops, stakeholder meetings and local ecological knowledge surveys, awareness-raising campaigns, discards monitoring programme, and trawl selectivity trials, as well as the more specific activities under the piked dogfish and the rapa whelk research programmes and the CetaByM and sturgeon pilot projects. The SC acknowledged the workplan for Black Sea activities adopted by the eleventh session of the Working Group for the Black Sea (WGBS11) and prioritized the activities of the BlackSea4Fish project over the 2025–2026 intersession, pending funding availability.