Metabarcoding of DNA extracted from community samples of whole organisms (whole organism community DNA, wocDNA) is a reliable and cost-efficient tool to study the biodiversity of metazoan communities (Bush et al., 2019; Ji et al., 2013; Porter & Hajibabaei, 2018). This approach, which has also been referred to as community DNA (e.g. Andújar et al., 2018b; Deiner et al., 2017) or bulk sample DNA (e.g. Braukmann et al., 2019; Yu et al., 2012) metabarcoding, primarily differs from other approaches such as eDNA (environmental or extra-organismal DNA; Taberlet et al., 2012) or iDNA (vertebrate DNA ingested by invertebrates; Schnell et al., 2012) in that the source material is a community of whole organisms collected through direct trapping or collection (e.g. malaise traps Ji et al., 2013, canopy fogging Creedy et al., 2019) or separated from an environmental sample (e.g. from soil Arribas et al. 2016 or water Suter et al., 2020). As a consequence, compared with eDNA and iDNA, wocDNA samples are characterised by (i) a comparatively low level of DNA degradation in the target species, (ii) a low proportion of non-target species, and (iii) the possibility for complementing, refining and/or validating metabarcoding-derived community data against other conventional morphological and molecular methods.