i’m not an R user myself, but i would guess it should be fairly straightforward to get data from the iNat API without rinat. if you figure out the basic process for that, i think that would open up a lot of possibilities for getting data from iNat, as well as other sources. this may help guide you down that path, if you’re interested: https://datascienceplus.com/accessing-web-data-json-in-r-using-httr/ or https://blog.exploratory.io/working-with-json-data-in-very-simple-way-ad7ebcc0bb89 or http://zevross.com/blog/2015/02/12/using-r-to-download-and-parse-json-an-example-using-data-from-an-open-data-portal/.
UPDATE: actually, i just remembered something. here’s some code that loarie posted in another thread that shows exactly how to pull data from the histogram API endpoint and generate a graph:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/1m-observations-this-month/2582/4.