Giving individual fishermen a specified share of the catch may help prevent overfishing and halt the collapse of fish stocks, according to a new report.

In regions where individual catch shares were used instead of just industry-wide quotas, the chances of a fishery collapsing were half that of fisheries that didn't use them, according to researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, writing in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

"Implementation of catch shares halts, and even reverses, the global trend toward widespread collapse," wrote authors Christopher Costello, Steven Gaines and John Lynham. "Institutional change has the potential for greatly altering the future of global fisheries."

In a catch-share system, an individual fisherman or fishing co-operative is allocated a share of the catch based on their share in previous years. These shares can be exercised or sold to others.

Catch shares are common in New Zealand, Australia and Iceland and have been implemented in some parts of the U.S. and Canada. Five fisheries use the individual quotas in Eastern Canada, and 14 use them along the Pacific Coast, a region that includes both British Columbia and Alaska.

The authors say the individual quotas, or catch shares, put a greater personal emphasis on stewardship of resources. Industry-wide quotas, on the other hand, motivate individuals in a "race to fish" to beat out others before the quotas are reached, the authors said.

The researchers based their findings on an analysis of 11,135 fisheries for a period from 1950 to 2003, of which 121 used individual transferable quotas. Even when accounting for factors such as location and time, the authors found fish-sharing strategies helped curb fisheries collapse.

The advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund welcomed the report.

"The trend around the world has been to fish the oceans until the fish are gone," said David Festa, the group's vice-president and oceans director. "The scientific data presented today shows we can turn this pattern on its head. Anyone who cares about saving fisheries and fishing jobs will find this study highly motivating."

With files from the Associated Press