A technique based on trigonometric spectral methods and structure selection is proposed for the reconstruction, from observed time series, of spatiotemporal systems governed by nonlinear partial differential equations of polynomial type with terms of arbitrary derivative order and nonlinearity degree. The system identification using Fourier spectral differentiation operators in conjunction with a structure selection procedure leads to a parsimonious model of the original system by detecting and eliminating the redundant parameters using orthogonal decomposition of the state data. Implementation of the technique is exemplified for a highly stiff reaction-diffusion system governed by the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation. Numerical experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed technique in terms of accuracy as well as robustness, even with smaller sets of sampling data.