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Since prehistoric times, the island of Sardinia—in the western Mediterranean—has played a leading role in the dynamics of human population and mobility, in the circulation of raw materials and artefacts, idioms and customs, of technologies and ideas that have enriched the biological, linguistic and cultural heritage of local groups. For the Phoenician and Punic periods (from the 9th to the 3rd centuries BCE), the ancient site of Nora—in southern Sardinia—represents an emblematic case in the study of migratory phenomena that occurred on the Island from the Iron Age until the Roman conquest. Despite the importance of exploring (and characterising) such movements from a wider bio-cultural perspective, the application of bio-geochemical tools for geographical provenance to the ancient skeletal populations of Sardinia is yet scarce. The present work is the first step towards filling this gap with the development of the first isoscape of southern Sardinia using new bioavailable Sr isotope data and a machine-learning approach. From a geolithological point of view, Sardinia is rather heterogeneous and requires detailed studies to correctly assess the distribution of the isotopic signature of bioavailable Sr. The random forest model employed here to construct the Sr isoscape uses several external environmental and geological variables. The most important predictors are related to age and bedrock type, with additional input from local soil properties. A 10-fold cross-validation gives a mean square error of 0.0008 and an R-squared of 0.81, so the model correctly predicts the 87Sr/86Sr ratio of unknown areas. By using a Bayesian provenance assignment workflow, we tested the isoscape here produced to determine the geographic origin and the mobility of archaeological and modern fauna collected from the Phoenician-Punic site of Nora and the surrounding Pula Plain. Our results indicate that archaeological sheep and goats (87Sr/86Sr < 0.7090) are compatible with areas close to Nora and Pula Plain, in agreement with archaeological evidence of pastoralism in those areas. Modern wild and domesticated fauna (87Sr/86Sr > 0.7090) show compatibility with several natural and anthropogenic locations in southern Sardinia, as expected based on modern species distribution data. Finally, we discuss the large Sr isotopic variability of the Nora baseline, where human mobility studies of human cremated and inhumed individuals are currently underway.

Backgound Throughout its range, red deer is a well-studied species. In Italy the species occupies two ecologically different ranges: the Alps and the Apennine. Although several studies have described spatial behaviour of red deer in the Italian Alps, no data are available for the Apennine population. Results Spatial behaviour of 13 deer from Northern Apennine range was analysed for the first-time using GPS-GSM telemetry, from 2011 to 2017. Red deer displayed two different strategies coexisting in the population, i.e., migratory and stationary. Females tend to migrate more than males. We found a high level of inter individual variability in the date of migration/return, while each migratory deer is very conservative during the study period. Migration ranges are on average 12±4.2 km far apart from the resident range. Both migratory and resident deer displayed high site fidelity. No switch from migratory to stationary strategy was observed for any deer during the study period, which however could have been too short to detect any switch. At management level, a spatial mismatch was found between deer range and management units (districts) in 44.4% of the cases. Merging the districts belonging of each province to obtain an area of approximately 1.000 km 2 would partially solve such spatial mismatch reducing it to 22%. Conclusions Despite the low sample size, these results can provide guidance for future management actions. An in-dept study with a higher sample size is however required to better understand and manage the red deer Apennine population.

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