Heavy metals are persistent and highly toxic pollutants in the environment due to their non-biodegradable nature and their capacity to bioaccumulate in living organisms (Tchounwou et al., 2012, Balali-Mood et al., 2021). These pollutants are particularly concerning as they are released into the environment through various anthropogenic activities, where they can biomagnify through the food chain, eventually causing severe health and ecological impacts. Notably, when these chemicals are discharged into water bodies, they accumulate in sediments and infiltrate food webs, posing threats to aquatic life and marine ecosystem health. Recognizing these threats, we leveraged different network toxicology approaches, such as Adverse Outcome Pathways (AOPs) and stressor-species networks, to gain a comprehensive understanding of their toxicological effects on both human and ecosystem health, which can help guide future risk mitigation strategies.

Here, we present the stressor-AOP networks based on associations with high quality and complete AOPs from AOP-Wiki, and the stressor-species networks based on acute and chronic toxicity values, and the bioconcentration factors from the ECOTOX database, and source-environmental media networks based on published evidence for:

• Arsenic and its inorganic compounds
• Cadmium and its inorganic compounds

This version of heavy metal-specific toxicity networks were released on 18 November 2024.