It was hours before dawn on a heaving Arctic sea, and snow showers were making it hard for Kurt Ludvigsen to find his fishing buoys with the trawler's powerful searchlight.

But the 49-year-old Norwegian was less bothered by the conditions than by the large numbers of cod flailing in the nets he and his younger brother, Trond, winched aboard.

"It's paradoxical but we have too many fish this year," the older Ludvigsen said. "Prices have fallen 30 percent ... We're having to work far harder."

Just over six years ago, an article in the U.S. journal Science projected that all fish and seafood species, on current trends, would collapse by 2048.

A cod bonanza off north Norway and Russia, and recovery of some fish stocks off the coasts of developed nations from the United States to Australia, have led many scientists to say the future for overfished world stocks is a bit less bleak.

Stocks off the coasts of developing nations — from the Pacific to the Caribbean — are still in sharp decline, but the recoveries give hope that the problems are not irreversible.

"The outlook is improving relative to what we saw in 2006," said Boris Worm, a professor of biology at Dalhousie University in Canada and lead author of the 2006 study in Science.

"It's more than isolated examples — it's a substantial number" of successes, he said.

A lot is at stake. Fisheries, both marine and farmed, provide livelihoods for up to 820 million people, according to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization, which emphasizes that globally, overfishing is still on the rise.

Cod, the 11th most-caught fish species on the FAO list (behind the Peruvian anchovy, skipjack tuna and Atlantic herring), has had a mixed fate.

While a 1990s fishing moratorium off eastern Canada is still in place, and European Union quotas are unchanged this year, the quota off northern Norway and Russia is a record 1.1 million tons, up a third from 2012, and six times as high as in 1990.

Part of the reason is that global warming has expanded the cod's habitat northwards. And strict management of quotas by Oslo and Moscow have played a role, fisheries experts say.

Among other encouraging examples: Fish landings off the United States rose to a 14-year-high in 2011, "thanks in part to rebuilding fish populations," according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

U.S. successes include Atlantic swordfish, summer flounder, New England scallops, Pacific lingcod and mid-Atlantic bluefish, the Washington-based Pew Environment Group said.

In September, another study in the journal Science said catches of the best-studied stocks off the coasts of developed nations were shifting towards sustainable levels.

"We now know that we can make fisheries recover," said Christopher Costello, lead author of that study, and a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

"That sounds obvious, but even 10 years ago many people would have disagreed, saying 'we've already decimated them to a point of no return.'"

Many experts are now dropping a belief that overfished stocks, like cod off Canada, can never revive. Closing fishing grounds, or cracking down on illegal catches, usually gives stocks a needed respite, he said.

That is much harder for developing nations, from the Philippines to Ecuador, to enforce, with the result that better conservation in one area may simply shift problems elsewhere.