Jonathan, William, and colleagues in the Mast Inference and Prediction (MASTIF) Network publish a paper in PNAS titled “Is there tree senescence? The fecundity evidence”. Short answer: Yes. Thanks to Tong Qiu and Jim Clark for leading this project!
Figure: Reconstructed evolution history of Dopt (the diameter when maximum fecundity occurs) using continuous character mapping. Note that the histogram is based on Dopt from all type A species (378 species in total) in Fig. 1 while 281 (∼ 74.3%) of them have phylogenetic trees. Phylogenetic signal was estimated using Pagel’s λ.