The Earth Microbiome Project (EMP) is a crowd-sourced, open-access effort to characterize the microbial communities of Earth. A uniform processing pipeline for 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing has sequenced tens of thousands of samples from hundreds of individual studies. Numerous insights have been gained from investigations within individual studies. Meta-analyses among the hundreds of studies in this diverse dataset will enable insight by placing individual studies and new samples in a global context. Current efforts are focused on expanding the EMP to paired metagenomic and metabolomic data collection. For more information about the Earth Microbiome Project, please go to the official EMP site.