Functional Diversity as a Metric for Animal Diversity in Early Modern Dutch Texts: First Insights

This paper explores functional diversity as an alternative metric for measuring animal diversity in Early Modern Dutch literature. Using a large corpus from DBNL (1500–1800), we compare traditional richness-based counts of animal mentions with a functional approach based on semantic distances in embedding space. The results show that while both metrics capture related phenomena, they produce different historical trajectories and interpretations. Functional diversity appears to capture qualitative variation that richness overlooks, suggesting that methodological choices significantly shape conclusions about biodiversity and cultural attitudes toward nature in literary texts.