A new approach for the estimation of spatial derivatives and the identification of a class of continuous spatio-temporal dynamical systems from experimental data is presented in this study. The proposed identification approach is a combination of implicit Adams integration and an orthogonal forward regression algorithm (OFR), in which the operators are expanded using polynomials as basis functions. The noisy experimental data are de-noised by using biorthogonal spline wavelet filters and the spatial derivatives are estimated using a multi-resolution analysis method. Finally, a bootstrap method is applied to re. ne the identified parameters from the OFR algorithm. The resulting identified models of the spatio-temporal evolution form a system of partial differential equations. Examples are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.