Fostering deep learning approaches to evaluate the impact of urbanization on vegetation and future prospects

•Urbanization and its effect on vegetation cover over 10 years in mega 6 cities of Punjab province, Pakistan is studied.•ΔEVI was forecasted by Deep learning algorithm long short-term memory recurrent neural network (LSTM-RNN).•Urbanization degrades vegetation during the entire period for all 6 cities.•Forecasted ΔEVI results have significant accuracy showing that decrease in vegetation.