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We attempted to classify 414 grassland stands dominated by Festuca rubra and Agrostis capillaris in the southeastern Carpathian region and to infer the main ecological factors underlying the observed floristic variation. Several internal criteria were employed to select the optimal number of clusters resulting from applying the fuzzy C-medians algorithm to the Bray-Curtis distance matrix. Species fidelity, non-metric multidimensional scaling and relative importance of four plant functional groups were subsequently used to validate floristically and ecologically the clusters of releves distinguished.