We focused this work on studies using whole organism community DNA (wocDNA) metabarcoding. In general, we define wocDNA samples as those where the target organisms were: (i) likely alive at the time of sampling, (ii) present as a largely complete specimen, and (iii) potentially identifiable using classical methods of morphological analysis. We exclude eDNA and iDNA metabarcoding due to the potentially different bioinformatic processing needs associated with these samples. In particular, eDNA and iDNA bioinformatic methods need to accommodate degraded DNA and a potentially high proportion of non-target reads. Furthermore, in many cases wocDNA metabarcoding is directly comparable to direct observation of specimens and conventional methods of taxonomic assignment not available for eDNA metabarcoding (Ji et al. 2013, Aylagas et al. 2016). This allows for more objective stringency thresholds in bioinformatic filtering and delimitation of operational taxonomic units (OTU).