Breakdown of universality in transitions to spatiotemporal chaos

We show that the transition from laminar to active behavior in extended cha otic systems can vary from a continuous transition in the universality clas s of directed percolation with infinitely many absorbing states to what app ears as a first-order transition. The latter occurs when finite lifetime no nchaotic structures, called "solitons," dominate the dynamics. We illustrat e this: scenario in an extension of the deterministic Chate-Manneville coup led map lattice model and in a soliton including variant of the stochastic Domany-Kinzel cellular automaton.