The rise and fall of biodiversity in literature: A comprehensive quantification of historical changes in the use of vernacular labels for biological taxa in Western creative literature.

The taxon label richness analysed so far (Figure 7, top left) represents the richness of taxon labels, ignoring the correlation to their actual taxon and thus including and distinguishing synonyms. Only one other frame within the corpus, contained in a book of animal anecdotes (Goodrich, 1845), exceeds 100 taxon labels gl Similar to a rank abundance curve in ecology, Figure 4 shows the one hundred most abundant taxon labels in the corpus, representing about two thirds of all occurrences of taxon labels. If we compare the richness trend of taxon labels to the development of the general lexical richness (Figure 7, bottom left) by calculating the ratio of taxon labels' richness and lexical richness (Figure 7, bottom right), we observe a relative decrease in taxon labels. Keywords: biodiversity in literature; computational literary studies; cultural ecosystem services; environmental humanities; historical biodiversity; Nature's Contributions to People; non-material contribution; text mining EN biodiversity in literature computational literary studies cultural ecosystem services environmental humanities historical biodiversity Nature's Contributions to People non-material contribution text mining 1093 1109 17 10/11/21 20211001 NES 211001 INTRODUCTION Our planet is losing biodiversity at unprecedented rates due to land-use change, direct exploitation, climate change, pollution and the invasion of exotic species (Cardinale et al., 2012; IPBES, 2019; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005; Tilman, 1999). 31.6% of all frames contained no taxon label and 6.5% of all frames contained 10 or more taxon labels. [Extracted from the article]