Abstract: In this paper, the vegetation of flood land meadows within a Swedish nature reserve was studied by using a number of popular numerical classification and ordination methods,which include a polythetic hierarchical agglomerative classification (TABORD program), a polythetic hieratchical divisive classification(TWINSPAN program),PCA ordination (ORDINA program), RA and DCA ordinations (DECORANA program). The results show that these 28 releves can be classified into six plant community types, which are distinguished along a soil-water gradient.In addition, the application of numerical classification and ordination in vegetation ecology and a comparison of these methods applied in this paper are discussed.