What we know so far about mining...

The server will repeatedly check the current amount of a material on a particular Island. From the image here -

Titan Ore we see a max/min and average amount of material. Once the resource drops below a certain level, a new patch will spawn.

The quantity of resource per tile will be fixed, and can be determined exactly by using the universal tile charge, but can hold many times more than units than the previous 'per cycle' method. Its safe to assume that with larger unit counts, the tile count will be reduced; resulting in smaller fields with equivalent yeilds, or at least initially.

Titan, of course is the most abundant resource, but even if we assume rarer resources trigger around 50% (opposed to the 90% in Zoom's example) that should still result in an 'over-all' abundance of material per day (assuming a 24 resource check).

Taking Titan though, since we have rough numbers...  From the picture, we see 10 fields, which would make each one about 100m units each to reach the 1B number; this is just the 'initial' allocation and the fields will get less organized as time progresses.

It sounds like each new field that spawns will be at least 100m units, but its unlikely that all 100m units will be drawn from the same initial field. In the old metrics, 100m units would be roughly 260 tiles (with ave. 100% bonus 1500/cycle) or about 20x12 red tiles. In the image though, the new fields look much larger then 20x12, so its also probably safe to assume that most tiles will be much less than 382k, and closer to 191k (min red tile yeild) or 520 tiles roughly 20x25 of all red.

With the current population, its not at all likely that 100m units would be mined from all islands daily, this is especially true since titan will be coming back to beta islands. However, Islands like Tellesis tend to attract more population than the other islands, and if the volumes shown for the A1 islands hold for A2, its reasonable to predict 100m units a day being mined off Telesis.

There will generally be two types of miners, those that clear fields and those that don't.

In general, few players will clear 100m unit field, but it would only take a few days before most fields have been partially mined, with new 100m fields spawning, until there are a large number of 20-50m unit fields spread around.

Worst case scenerio, is ending up with about (450) 2m unit fields, and (1) 100m unit field.

However, the passable terrain on alpha islands really isn't that large, so 450 fields would end up being fairly close to each other, so that degree of fragmentation would be highly unlikely; its highly probable that a miner will move 400m to a second patch to mine it, so the concept of a 'field' generally changes from a 20x10 patch to maybe (5) 5x5 patches in a sq 1k.

So, in cases like Titan at least, because of it's abundance and fairly large respawn size, even on alpha the fragmentation shouldn't be too extensive.

Of course, this is a seperate issue from the scanning effect of leaving solo tiles.

Less abundant ores though, could easily be more fragmented. Assuming a material like Stermonite which seems to have roughly 60% less abundancy; would make it 400m units per island instead of 1B. There are only (8) sites in the image which would place it at 50m units per, and make the respawn roughly 20%.

While 50m is much smaller then titan's 100m, the time it takes to mine Stermonite is also greater; not 50% more, but almost (750 base for titan versus 450 for sterm). However, this actually favors additional fragmentation, since longer mining times means it's less likely for fields to be fully mined in one session.

Because its likely then to have (100) stermonite fields of 4m units, these are not going to be under the same spacing pressure as titan at 400 fields would have been, that is the smaller fields will be further apart, far enough to not be considered a 'patch of fields'.

tl-dr: Mining fragmentation will occur for less abundant resources, which will result in a significant reduction in mining yields of ore/hour. However, with fixed yeild tiles, and generally smaller fields, it will be effective to have a geo-scanner installed on (1) mining bot (or if you fleet mine, installed on your nexus bot) to plan your next hop.