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Interactive display planned for DNR Building at the Iowa State Fair
The D-N-R building on the Iowa State Fairgrounds known for its large tanks displaying the various fish species from across the state is getting a new interactive display.
DNR spokesperson Tammie Krausman says the new feature is called the Conservation Discovery Area. “We’re going to kind of give a loose interpretation of a cave, kind of representing Maquoketa Caves. And it’s going to be interactive, where anyone can go in it. We might have some like creatures in there, some bats, maybe some different things that you can feel and learn,” she says. The inside feature will also have a tower designed into it that’s modeled after the one at Pilot Knobb State Park.
Krausman says there will also be an in-floor river. “We are looking at doing a little bit of, kind of colored concrete, and maybe some kind of walk-over areas where you can look in and kind of experience what Iowa’s waterways look like, and the type of kind of fish and creatures that live in there, again, to kind of think about the stuff that you maybe don’t really think about living in our rivers. And so how can we kind of get that really close to you, and especially for all those kiddos,” Krausman says.
They had various outdoor displays in the 100 years the building has been on the fairgrounds, and an archery area has been one of the more recent popular attractions. Krausman says the new feature will fit in well with what they have now. “Yeah, we want to keep trying to bring the elements that the state has, like the fisheries, the, you know, ability to try out some recreational archery or air rifle shooting,” she says. “And now one of the things that we can do is try to bring some really cool, iconic park things into the State Fair, hopefully, get people to engage with that a little bit and get curious enough that maybe they want to go out and explore to the state parks in Iowa.”
Krausman says it’s hard to nail down exactly how many visitors the DNR building gets during the entire run of the State Fair. “We know that we have visitors from nearly every single county in the state, and we know that we have visitors from several other states and sometimes other countries. We have seen, during a pretty solid day, a weekday, that 11-thousand people came into our building in the like a two to three hour period.”
The Natural Resource Commission approved the project at its monthly meeting and Krausman says they hope to have it done sometime in July. “We are really hoping it’ll be ready for this year’s fair. So we’re excited. Last year we unveiled the courtyard and the range and the stage, and now we’re hoping to kind of complete our phase with this big inside interactive display,” she says.
The NRC approved a contract with Austincrete of Newton for nearly $125,000 to build the display. Krausman says the money comes from a $ 500,000 special legislative appropriation that was made to fund the update at the DNR building.
