Microbial ecologists must coordinate to archive sample collections and genetic material. This will prevent valuable specimens from being lost to science and allow rigorous assessment of the effects of globally changing factors, disease and pollution on microbial communities.

Archiving is particularly valuable for hard-to-obtain or irreplaceable samples: for example, those from deep-sea hydrothermal vents or subglacial lakes in Antarctica. Samples may form an important time series, as in faecal material from extant populations never exposed to antibiotics, or soils from high-latitude systems threatened with biodiversity loss because of climate change.

Data generation is cheap, and getting cheaper. Technologies now exist to store DNA at room temperature for long periods and to reanalyse samples directly, which is better than trying to cobble together previous data sets generated using outdated methods. Reanalysis can also enable comparison of samples collected at different sites or time points.

In microbial ecology, proper sample archiving will accelerate advances, as collections of plants, animals and cultures have done for other areas of biology.