Metabarcoding of wocDNA samples is increasingly employed in community ecology, evolutionary ecology, biogeography, conservation biology, environmental management, and policy and decision-making (e.g. Bush et al., 2020; deWaard et al., 2019; Leese et al., 2018). Metazoan wocDNA metabarcoding has been adapted from pioneering approaches developed to inventory and characterise microbial diversity (e.g. Gilbert et al., 2010; Sogin et al., 2006).  The majority of these adaptations have focused on sampling, and molecular laboratory steps, including adapted protocols to (i) sample, separate, enrich and/or clean animal wocDNA samples (Creedy et al., 2019; Fonseca et al., 2010, 2011), (ii) perform wocDNA extractions (Marquina et al., 2019; Nielsen et al., 2019), (iii) design and evaluate primers (Braukmann et al., 2019; Elbrecht & Leese, 2017, Elbrecht et al. 2019), optimise amplification (Krehenwinkel et al., 2017) and prepare libraries (Yang et al., 2020). There is a growing consensus on the use of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) barcode, rather than other markers widely used for metabarcoding of non-metazoan communities, as the standard for wocDNA metabarcoding due to the range of COI primers with demonstrated efficiency (Braukmann et al., 2019; Elbrecht & Leese, 2017), and the potential of COI to improve the utility, resolution and reliability of wocDNA metabarcoding data (Andújar et al., 2018a; Turon et al., 2020).