A harmonized ecotoxicity dataset for honeybee based on the ECOTOX database

Among the most crucial pollinators, managed honeybee (Apis mellifera) colonies frequently experience colony losses, which impose significant economic burdens on beekeeping and threaten the reliability of pollination services. Pesticide exposure is recognized as one stressor among others contributing to these losses. However, the curated harmonized dataset to characterize the impacts of multiple pesticides on different stages of honeybees is missing. To address this data gap, we generated an extensive and consistent honeybee ecotoxicity dataset of top (dermal)-acute 10% effective dose (ED10) and oral-chronic ED10 from the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency Ecotoxicology Knowledgebase (ECOTOX databases) for life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) and other comparative assessments. Primary harmonization and standardization were conducted to resolve inherent inconsistencies in life stages, exposure types, effect types, units, endpoints, and test types. Subsequently, weighted linear regressions were applied to extrapolate various endpoints to a harmonized ED10-equivalent (ED10eq), with R2 ranging from 0.38-0.99. The resulting integrated datasets comprise 540 chemicals across oral-chronic, oral-acute, and acute-topical exposure scenarios, consistently spanning approximately eight orders of magnitude for the adult groups and six orders of magnitude for the larval groups. Additionally, the relationship between adult and larva ecotoxicity data was analyzed, along with an uncertainty assessment for the oral-chronic and top-acute datasets, further enhancing the reliability and applicability of the harmonized data. These harmonized ecotoxicity datasets significantly enhance the LCIA framework by replacing the median effective dose (ED50) acute data with oral-chronic top-acute ED10 data, thus facilitating a more environmentally realistic assessment of pesticide impacts on honeybees.