Introduction. Establishing the statuses of species and compiling checklists of species is an urgent issue of modern faunistics, and description and monitoring of biodiversity. Checklists are a form of compact presentation of information about the composition of the fauna allowing to catalogue the collected field and collection material systematically and with the use of categories of significance and to effectively carry out its further analysis.The aim of the research is to analyse the practices of compiling indexed checklists, updating such data into a single system, and proposals for maintaining control checklists indexed by the statuses of presence, abundance, rarity, etc.Materials and methods. The issue of compiling indexed or control checklists of fauna, checklists that are supplemented with additional information about the status of the species, is considered in detail. Such statuses can be categories of presence, abundance, conservation, economic importance, etc. Among other issues, two main groups that are important during the description of wild fauna under natural conditions are considered: statuses of presence and abundance.Results. The following presence statuses were established: "endemic", "rare", "extinct", "common", and "alien". Detailed statuses of presence ("migrant", "transitive", "hibernating", "probably extinct", etc.) and categories of rarity, in particular vulnerability, of species necessary for indicating protection needs are considered. The authors consider such letter designations to be the most convenient for conversion into a point scale. Abundance categories ("commonness") are presented as a system of verbal categories and point evaluations, including 3 to 6 gradations, of which three are basic (rare, common, abundant) and two are additional (occasional, highly abundant). Point scores correspond to a specific, measurable level of abundance and are presented on a logarithmic scale. Examples of the use of combined indexing systems of such lists are also considered. Combined versions of indexed checklists can become the object of comparisons of the population sizes of different habitats or communities, etc., since different biotopes can differ both by the presence of species and in their relative abundance and set of dominant species. The general experience of arranging indexed checklists makes it possible to optimise the designation of species in regional faunal lists. Numerical designations are best combined with levels of their abundance, and statuses are best indicated by letter codes.Conclusions. The analysis of the indexed fauna lists shows that the system of brief symbolic designations of statuses can be used for a compact perception of information about the specifics of the species, and the narrowing of the research tasks makes it possible to minimise the number of code designations.