We present results from the largest contiguous narrow-band survey in the near-infrared. We have used the wide-field infrared camera/Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and the lowOH2 filter (1.187+/-0.005{mu}m) to survey ~10deg^2^ of contiguous extragalactic sky in the SA22 field. A total of ~6000 candidate emission-line galaxies are found. We use deep ugrizJK data to obtain robust photometric redshifts. We combine our data with the High-redshift(Z) Emission Line Survey (HiZELS), explore spectroscopic surveys (VVDS, VIPERS) and obtain our own spectroscopic follow-up with KMOS, FMOS and MOSFIRE to derive large samples of high-redshift emission-line selected galaxies: 3471 H{alpha} emitters at z=0.8, 1343 [OIII] + H{beta} emitters at z=1.4 and 572 [OII] emitters at z=2.2. We probe comoving volumes of >10^6^Mpc^3^ and find significant overdensities, including an 8.5{sigma} (spectroscopically confirmed) overdensity of H{alpha} emitters at z=0.81. We derive H{alpha}, [OIII] + H{beta} and [OII] luminosity functions at z=0.8, 1.4, 2.2, respectively, and present implications for future surveys such as Euclid. Our uniquely large volumes/areas allow us to subdivide the samples in thousands of randomized combinations of areas and provide a robust empirical measurement of sample/cosmic variance. We show that surveys for star-forming/emission-line galaxies at a depth similar to ours can only overcome cosmic-variance (errors 5x10^5^Mpc^3^; errors on L and {phi} due to sample (cosmic) variance on surveys probing ~10^4^ and ~10^5^Mpc^3^ are typically very high: ~300 and ~40-60 percent, respectively.

Cone search capability for table J/MNRAS/451/2303/tablea1 (The catalogue of all Sigma>3 NB sources selected in the SA22 field from this paper)