Inland fisheries are important contributors to global food security and poverty alleviation, yet they face multiple intensifying pressures from competing demands for water resources, land development, climate change, and resource extraction. Planning for resiliency amidst these changes and effectively tracking progress toward global targets for sustainability and biodiversity conservation requires a baseline assessment of inland fisheries and their habitats. However, there is no standardized method to monitor and assess the status of inland fisheries. Given the limited and disparate nature of fishery harvest data, a practical approach to develop such an assessment is the use of a risk index derived from evaluating the quantity and quality of habitats that support inland fisheries. The purpose of this study was to develop a geospatially-weighted framework for assessing threats at a nested watershed scale. We attribute open-source environmental, human, and climate data to sub-basins, then assign relative weights derived from multiple evidence bases. To do this, we (1) synthesize evidence of direct anthropogenic threats to major inland fisheries using coupled automated and manual text classification methods, (2) quantify perceptions of threats to major inland fisheries using an analytical hierarchy process from a global survey of fishery professionals, and (3) derive relative importance scores using numerical modeling. The resulting data products provide a visual and quantifiable indication of the relative level of threats to inland fisheries at basin and sub-basin scales. Initial findings suggest that nearly half of global fishery catch is under an intermediate level of threat, over one-third is moderately threatened, and nearly 10% is severely threatened. The results from this study can inform the development of inland fisheries indicators and threat-based metrics and enable a more objective narrative around the management and conservation of aquatic ecosystems amidst accelerating anthropogenic pressures.