Abstract

:, Chile has made varied efforts to avoid the lost of its biodiversity, Laws, workshops and symposia have been promulgated and developed with the purpose to analyze and to improve this topic. These activities have been efficient to categorize the flora and fauna of the national territory. However, to achieve a consent of the basic limits to continue with these actions is ditficult: the criteria and methods used by the experts differ in the global evaluation of a species when it is assigned to some conservation state. In this work, we analyzed the development and current state of the categorizations, criteria and methodologies used in Chile to evaluate the conservation status of the flora and fauna. We considered articles, technical reports and legal aspects, in chronological way. Based on the present analysis a wide coincidence is detected among the position from Marquet et al. (2000) with the proposals of IUCN (2001), where both assigned more value to the data of population type (fluctuation and population abundances) and distribution ranges. Based on these arguments the methodology proposed by Marquet et al. (2000) is recognized as most modem, and we suggest their application for the future flora and fauna categorizations in Chile. However, it is necessary to highlight the lack of antecedents and information in many areas of the biology of the species that difficult at the moment, its application, requiring to direct the studies toward the areas with deficiencies.