PORTLAND (AP) — Federal fisheries managers in San Diego approved a new management plan for groundfish — the West Coast’s biggest fishery.

The system approved Friday by the Pacific Fishery Management Council is known as individual fishery quotas. Starting in 2011, the quotas will allow fishermen to fish when they please for their own specified share of the overall catch. Fisheries in New Zealand, Australia, Alaska, and British Columbia have adopted similar systems.

Groundfish are 82 species, caught mostly by trawlers hauling nets along the ocean bottom, that are sold in U.S. fish markets as sole, flounder, lingcod, snapper, and imitation crab. The fishery has been troubled by low prices and the collapse of some stocks. The new system is expected to prevent overfishing, increase prices to fishermen and reduce bycatch — the netting of unwanted fish that get thrown overboard dead.

A major dispute was whether the council should give West Coast fish-processing plants a cut of the roughly 100,000-ton catch to be allocated to trawl fishermen under the plan.

Fishermen pressed the council to drop a draft provision adopted earlier this year that would give a 20 percent share of quotas to processors.

The fishermen got a split decision. The council decided to give the entire nonwhiting part of the fishery to fishermen. The processors, however, will get 20 percent of the whiting.

“The council moved in the right direction, but they are still making a terrible mistake,” said Pete Leipzig, executive director of the Fishermen’s Marketing Association, which represents the groundfish fleet.

West Coast processors said they needed a share to ensure a reliable supply of fish. Fishermen who get a quota share could otherwise sell the rights to fishermen and plants in other areas, leaving some processing plants without product.