Agrochemical exposure can threaten bees with substantial ecological risks. The rapid and accurate prediction of agrochemical ecotoxicity to bees is thus urgently needed; however, existing models are constrained by single-type structural inputs, resulting in limited accuracy and generalizability. This study presents BeeEcoTox, a multimodal graph-learning framework for predicting agrochemical ecotoxicity to bees. The model fuses ChemFM-derived semantic features with molecular graphs through a graph isomorphism network with internal batch normalization, combined with structural features from 1,139 agrochemicals. Inherent class imbalance in the curated data set is addressed through a cost-sensitive learning approach to ensure that the model prioritizes high recall in detecting ecotoxic agrochemicals without compromising overall performance. BeeEcoTox achieves state-of-the-art performance, with area under the curve and recall values of 0.91 and 0.90, respectively, following rigorous benchmarking against a suite of baseline models. Model explainability is enhanced through the use of GNNExplainer, a model-agnostic approach for identifying key toxicophores. BeeEcoTox is deployed as a publicly available web-based platform (https://www.ai4environ.cn/BeeEcoTox) to support advanced ecological risk assessments of agrochemicals and the development of new approach methodologies.
Chen et al. (Tue,) studied this question.