Jacob’s upbringing on the family sheep station and time spent with Indigenous peoples formed and established his connection with nature early in life. His appreciation of biodiversity, his ecological empathy, and his conservation ethos led him to relinquish his industrial electrician’s tools to begin research to better understand this connection. Working at the microscopic scale, he and his colleagues have shown that the urban microbial world is somewhat tied to a city’s larger biodiversity. They have also shown that urban green spaces with more complex vegetation diversity give children better exposure to complex soil microbiomes which potentially reduce the incidence of non-communicable disease through improved training of their immune systems. Published in the journal Restoration Ecology, his work won the International Society for Ecological Restoration’s 2017 Bradshaw Medal for ‘work that significantly advances the field’ for the paper titled: Urban habitat restoration provides a human health benefit through microbiome rewilding: the Microbiome Rewilding Hypothesis. Working with TREENET and the City of Unley, in 2022 Jacob began a study to investigate variation in the soil microbiome in Heywood Park, a high profile urban green space in Unley Park in South Australia. Analysis underway in May 2022 will reveal microbe diversity and abundance beneath areas of irrigated turf, mulched tree root zones, and well-established and companion-planted mass-mulched tree protection zones. This study may reveal whether mulching and understorey planting warrants further development and application in urban green space as a biodiversity intervention. For more see: https://www.jacobmills.org/scientific-articles