We have noticed a shift in the way funding agencies and journal editors are viewing observational science. It seems that the value of traditional surveys and exploration is being undermined — particularly in the field of microbial ecology. But without these surveys, scientific advances will stall.

Apart from the Census of Marine Life (http://www.coml.org), it is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain funding for even small-scale surveys of life. This is despite the success of large-scale observational studies such as the Global Ocean Sampling metagenomic study (D. B. Rusch et al. PLoS Biol. 5, e77; 2007), which resulted in more than 100 papers that helped to generate and test hypotheses on marine microbial communities. Later, the TARA Oceans survey (http://oceans.taraexpeditions.org) used a similar experimental approach, incorporating statistical design and contextual metadata.

The resulting explosion of metagenomic discovery now extends to the human digestive tract (http://www.metahit.eu; http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/hmp) and to the soil (http://www.terragenome.org; T. M. Vogel et al. Nature Rev. Microbiol. 7, 252; 2009). Only now, and only with metagenomics, do we have the potential to crack open the microbial black box that operates all of Earth's ecosystems (see, for example, the Earth Microbiome Project: http://www.earthmicrobiome.org).

Charles Darwin's skills in using meticulous survey observations as a basis for scientific theory are still just as relevant today.