Freshwater ecosystems are highly threatened at a global scale, yet assessing biotic disruption at the ecosystem level has been a persistent challenge due to a lack of long-term monitoring data of its biotic components. This gap limits our ability to report on biotic change for global conservation frameworks, including the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems (RLE), a headline indicator of multiple targets in the Global Biodiversity Framework. While species diversity and population change are useful indicators of freshwater ecosystem health, a growing body of literature shows that functional diversity can capture mechanistic and trophic shifts within an ecosystem. In this study, using data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which spans a greater spatial, temporal, and taxonomic range than existing monitoring datasets, we assess global shifts in the functional space of freshwater fish communities and examine conservation risks associated with such change. We aggregated GBIF records into ten-year periods for each basin to obtain species composition within each basin-period. We then tested how metrics of functional diversity (functional richness, evenness, and turnover) relate to basin-specific conservation risk, measured through the Red List Index and the number and proportion of threatened species. This approach investigates the potential of using functional diversity as an indicator of ecosystem change to inform global conservation assessments.