New species are still being described, and the relationships between tepui species and their lowland relatives are still being worked out using the molecular genetic tools that were not available to earlier generations of botanists.

The completeness of the botanical inventory from any given tepui, including Roraima, is limited by the challenges of access.

The cliffs that make the summit an extraordinary evolutionary laboratory also make it difficult and expensive to visit for scientific purposes.

Many parts of the Roraima summit have been visited by scientists only rarely, and the possibility of finding species not yet known to science remains real.

The Novelist Who Never Went And The World He Invented