Relative Abundance and Conservation: Is the Golden Mouse a Rare Species?

Most mammalian species in North America are neither widespread nor abundant, and as noted by Kunin and Gaston (1993:298), “… most of the world’s species are rare in some sense of the word.” Rarity of species—and their enhanced potential for extinction—is a fundamental concept in conservation biology. Nonetheless, there is little consensus as to the meaning of the term “rare” in the biological literature (cf. Gaston 1994a, 1997, Munton 1987). Although implicitly understood to be “not common,” rare has been defined in a “… variety of different ways and at a range of spatial scales” such that “… studies are seldom directly comparable in any but the broadest qualitative sense” (Gaston and Kunin 1997:12).