The recently finished FP6 RI Black Sea SCENE project has established a Black Sea Scientific Network of leading environmental and socio-economic research institutes, universities and NGO’s from the countries around the Black Sea and has developed a distributed virtual data and information infrastructure that is populated and maintained by these organisations to improve the identification, access, exchange, quality indication and use of their data and information about the Black Sea. The Black Sea SCENE research infrastructure stimulates scientific cooperation, exchange of knowledge and expertise, and strengthens the regional capacity and performance of marine environmental data and information management, underpins harmonization with European marine data quality control/assessment procedures and adoption of international meta-data standards and data-management practices, providing improved data & information delivery services for the Black Sea region at a European level. The Up-Grade of Black Sea SCENE project aims: a) to extend the existing research infrastructure with 19 marine environmental institutes/organizations from the 6 Black Sea countries, b) to implement the results of the Joint Research Activities of the FP6 RI SeaDataNet project (common communication standards and adapted technologies to ensure the datacenters interoperability), c) to network the existing and new Black Sea datacenters, active in data collection, and provide integrated databases of standardized quality on-line, d) to realize and improve on-line access to in-situ and remote sensing data, meta-data and products and e) to adopt standardized methodologies for data quality checking to ensure the quality, compatibility and coherence of the data issuing from so many sources. The Up-Grade Black Sea SCENE project is undertaken by 51 partners of which 43 are located in the Black Sea countries.