The Venezuelan botanist Bassett Maguire spent decades studying the tepui flora, making numerous ascents to various summits and coordinating the description of many new tepui plant species.

His work, conducted primarily in the middle decades of the twentieth century through the American Museum of Natural History and in collaboration with Venezuelan institutions, was foundational for the scientific understanding of tepui botany.

More recent decades have seen a shift toward molecular systematic studies — using DNA analysis to understand the relationships between tepui species and their lowland relatives — and toward ecological studies that go beyond mere description to investigate the functional ecology of tepui communities: how the organisms interact with each other, how nutrients cycle through the ecosystem, how the system responds to disturbance.

The discovery and description of new species continues.