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We report on a mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser delivering highly-chirped pulses with several tens of nanojoules of energy around 1560 nm and its exploitation to efficiently pump a fiber optical parametric oscillator (FOPO), thus enabling picosecond pulse generation around 1700 nm. The laser cavity features a high normal dispersion and mode-locking is sustained using tailored spectral filtering combined with nonlinear polarization evolution and a semiconductor saturable absorber. Numerical simulations show that the laser dynamics is governed by a strong mode-locking mechanism compensating for the large spectral and temporal pulse evolution along the cavity. In the frame of high energy picosecond pulse generation around 1700 nm, we then demonstrate that using highly-chirped pulses as pump pulses allows for the efficient tuning of the FOPO idler wavelength between 1620 and 1870 nm. In addition, satisfying noise characteristics have been achieved both for the Er-laser and the FOPO, with respective relative intensity noises (RIN) of −154 and −140 dBc/Hz, thus paving the way for the use of such sources in ultrafast instrumentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]